Hull design software with 3D rendering

[ade white]

Hi does anyone know of an 'easy' program or could recommend...

[Phil Alderson]

I have used Hullform, which has been superseeded by delft ship. It is free, and not too hard to use but a bit basic. Still you get what you pay for.

[Will_Lee]

Rhino is free (but has only 20 saves). However the counter of saves is not v good. In fact mine has never run out - two boats later!

W

[stom]

PTC Creo Elements is free to download and use - no restrictions.  It used to be called Pro-Desktop.  It's used by a lot of schools for teaching basic CAD and is fully compatible with Pro-Engineer if you need to do anything more complex.

[john_hamilton]

I used pro desktop!

Edit: If you make anything like a boat on it, I will applaud you sir

[BenR]

Rhino is free (but has only 20 saves). However the counter of saves is not v good. In fact mine has never run out - two boats later!

W

Agreed,
I have a little trick that changes the counter every time I open it so I always have 1000 saves

The hull and foil analysis package (Orca 3d) is not so easy to fool though.

[Clive Everest]

I wrote a visual basic program to design my hull.
It allows far more numeric control of the hull form.
The hull is defined from the rocker line, the chine height and width, the bottom panel width and turn of bilge as a percentage of the chine width, the topside angle, the gunwale height and the wing angle.
Each of these is defined at the bow, the transom and a blend of first second and occasionally third order curves.
The whole hull form is defined by a matrix of numbers.
The program will then work out how the hull floats for a given displacement position and heel angle. It will then work out hydrostatics.
It can scan heel and LCB to allow hydrostatics to be plotted over a range of values.
This allows me to very quickly adjust the hull form to get the desired hydrostatics, and grantees that the hull form is inherently fair.
The program displays line drawings but not rendered 3D.
It will generate panel shapes to make the mould frames and planks and for the foam planks.
These are generated as text files that can be dropped straight into the command line of autocad.
It would also generate full station sections that could e imported as sketches into Inventor to loft and view a rendered 3d view. This was a more convoluted process, but it is useful to view in 3D before starting to build.

[Will_Lee]

Busy!

I like your 'hard numerics' hull design approach. Davro did the same (with a programmable calculator). How much is the statics influencing your decisions?

We found ourselves using Rhino in unexpected ways. For example we modelled the tube-to-tube joins in Rhino and used a command called 'develop surface' and then printed it out. We wrapped the printout around the tube and we had a nice line to cut. Once cut it fitted the other tube pretty closely at the right angle. The limit was our dremel skills.

[Tom K]

I too am a fan of the numbers approach. My main criticism of maxsurf is it's mainly graphical control.

That said, all my hull forms were done in maxsurf, then exported to autocad for 2D drafting.

I advise against using maxsurf for anything more than a hull. Foils, deck shapes etc are much better done in Rhino.

Maxsurf also defaults to a small number of control points, as most hull forms start as tubes. This leaves only a single set of longitudinal control points between the chines, often leading to a centreline kink. This kink is easy to spot on real yachts at boat shows once you'r looking for it.

[phil_kirk]

There is a much easier way to do tube to tube joints with out going anywhere near a computer.
Roughly cut into the end of the tube with dremel to create the shape of the second tube.  Wrap sandpaper over the second tube or something of a similar diameter. Sand away at the rough end of tube 1 until you have reached the desired shape.

Simples!

[Ben Howett]

Interestingly my approach is a mixture of most of the previous replies.

Like Clive I have my own program and I can define hulls by various parameters (I actually have a few versions for this depending on the style of hull i'm working with. Cherub design parameters arent a good fit for container ship design parameters)

Where my program differs is that this program has no inherent modeling capabilities - instead it is linked to the maxsurf suite which handles the real work - both for lines plans and 3D rendering, and quite a bit of the analysis including the hydrostatics and stability checks. These numbers are then automatically exported back into an excel spreadsheet, and can be fed into an optimisation routine which will then go on to produce future hullforms.

Its fun to work through several thousand cherub designs in a day - But the optimisation is only as good as the analysis methods, and the goals you select so it is really of limited use if left to its own devices.

Any detail design is usually done in Rhino - though I do have scripts which will automatically produce decks/racks/gantries etc for any given hullform based on some limited inputs so I can do a lot of this in Maxsurf too if needed.

All this could be done for free, but there have recently been some changes to the Maxsurf academic licencing which means the free version is not currently available. I'm actually teaching the Maxsurf classes here and this has caused major problems for us - but unfortunately it does not seem to be something the new owners of Maxsurf are willing to change. Delftship is a good  free alternative in my experience.

[Will_Lee]

There is a much easier way to do tube to tube joints with out going anywhere near a computer.
Roughly cut into the end of the tube with dremel to create the shape of the second tube.  Wrap sandpaper over the second tube or something of a similar diameter. Sand away at the rough end of tube 1 until you have reached the desired shape.

Simples!

I did try something like this, with a jig to maintain the correct angle of course. It kinda worked but the thickness of the sandpaper made it a v loose fit. Also its not obvious before you start how long it will all be, so you need access to the other end to trim, which I don't think we had at all. We ended up with the 'develop surface' method which was not perfect. The more craftily gifted can just eyeball things which I cannot!

[phil_kirk]

Perhaps the joint was a little loose but it was a lot closer than I would have achieved by anything other practical method.  I don't mind leaving 0.5mm for a bonding joint. The principal aim was to avoid voids in the joint, get good load transfer between each component, good stiffness and achieve maximum beam of the boat.

I supported the free end of the tube used as the sanding block with a peice of wood clampped to the underside of the other beam for alignment.

[Will_Lee]

Yes - The E5s have many fewer tube/tube joins than Atum: 4 vs 16!

[roland_trim]

Any detail design is usually done in Rhino - though I do have scripts which will automatically produce decks/racks/gantries etc for any given hullform based on some limited inputs so I can do a lot of this in Maxsurf too if needed.

If you pick up Rhino then adding/learning "Grasshopper" is my strong reccomendaiton.

Grassshopper is a scripting tool that makes anything you can do in Rhino into a parametric process. Programming is like the "lego builder" interface. After a couple of weeks of playing with it I now open Grasshopper for simple drawing instead of clicking the Rhino buttons. In simple terms turning the 4mm ribs into 2.5mm ribs in the images below took 4 clicks! In addition to making all of the jigsaw instersections, it was also fairly quick to click in a script to lay out the frames so I could send them to the cutters (it would do proper nesting as well if needed).