CAD

[Soñadora]

For those who may know, is Orca3D still a good package for hull design or is there something better? I am a highly proficient SolidWorks junky. I can tell you it’s not good for hull design. At least not as good as Rhino. It’s great for everything else, though and there is a direct import into SolidWorks meaning it maintains updates to the hull in rhino.

I know a lot of commercial outfits us Catia but that’s too rich for me.

[JoeP]

I have used Rhino since it was known as AccuModel, and Orca 3D since its inception. At Delta we had about 12 seats of Rhino and 3 floating licenses of Orca 3D. At Jensen where I now work all 30-40 of us have Rhino but we use GHS for stability and a few other pieces of software for propulsion, FEA etc. We do not use Orca3D. Rhino has become the go to tool for many if not most yacht design firms these days but there are others out there like Prosurf, Maxsurf, Multisurf, and Delft ship which seem to be capable. The big stuff like Cadmatic is mostly for large ship dedign, although I have designed yachts to 247 ft in Rhino with Orca and in my current job we design everything from 40 ft utility tugs to 400 ft articulated tug barge vessels with Rhino. In my opinion for the price Rhino and Orca are the best bet for 3d surface modeling and hydrostatics.

For drafting I have used AutoCAD at both Delta and Jensen but Rhino''s 2D drafting has improved a lot. Paul Bieker and Eric Jolley now do most of their drafting directly in Rhino. The last time i was in their office the were even importing stuff from Solidworks into Rhino for 2D work. We use AutoCAD at Jensen because we do all of our plate lofting in Ship Constructor, an industry standard program which is a 3rd party plug in for AutoCAD.

There is another program out there which I believe is a plug in for Rhino which does some pretty cool parametric structural modeling but I cannot remember it's name.
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[Soñadora]

Thanks Joe,

I have played around with Orca and like the step-by-step process for guiding me through hull design. As you might guess, I won't be designing ships. This will be primarily for creating nice renderings for guys like BobP or Y-M Tanton.

As I am a SolidWorks addict, I like the capabilities of solid modeling things like the deck structure and all the hardware. Plus, SolidWorks 2D is way better than what I remember AutoCAD to be. Maybe it's improved, but nothing bets being able to maintain 2D-3D associativity.

Good to hear that Rhino is still a good base. I will pull the trigger on the Orca3D suite. As a CAD instructor, I have access to the instructor version.

[JoeP]

One of the things I like about Orca is that you can have a real time update of several of the coefficients as you model.