Design Software

[Spindle]

I'm looking for some new design software. Any suggestions?

[Chillmark]

Freeship is, well, free. If you are looking for commercial applications you should think about ProSurf and/or Rhino. (incidentally, I am selling Prosurf and Rhino and CAD 2006 if you're interested).

[Bruce Taylor]

Free!Ship 2.6 or DELFTship Free.

DELFTship pro is very reasonably priced. You can add modules as you need them, and as finances permit.

[Spindle]

Thanks Guys! I've already got AutoCAD mechanical. I'll look into freeship.

[Chris Ostlind]

It all depends on what your design goals might be. Each and every design software package has its own strengths and also, its own weaknesses.

As for free, there is another quite easy to learn package called Hulls by Carlson Design. Hulls allows you to create an enormously wide range of vessels for plywood construction, comes with a huge library of previously created boats which can serve as jumping-off points for your own design an translates easily to offsets or .dxf files so you can print-out templates at full size. Hulls has a simplified version of a hydrostatic feature with the basics accurately covered.

Freeship will accept Hulls' .hul files as imported items. You can further tweak the file and the form there and run some very accurate hydrostatics on the hull. I find the process of fairing, reconfiguring and just plain drawing a boat to be a bit tedious in Freeship. Then again, I use Rhino as my principal design software.

Rhino is a truly powerful tool for both chine built, as well as smooth hulled, designs. Yes, it costs right around $1K, but it has so much to offer it will set you back in your seat when you fully comprehend the potential. It's fast and deals with really complex math calculation issues in short order... especially if you are running a dual core processor. For simple boats, this is not an issue. It really comes to the fore when you have a complex boat with lots and lots of polygonal forms and you are moving them about in the 3D perspective mode... and also, for rendering.

[Frank E. Price]

Damn, I should never have let my cursor linger over this thread. After reading it earlier today I checked out FREEship and DELFTship (FREEship is now DELFTship Free, ver. 3.2) and downloaded it. It'll take the next several months for me to figure out what to do with it! As for the others . . .

Or I could build the next skiff. It's still too cold. Better find something to do indoors for a while yet.

Frank

[Bruce Taylor]

FREEship is now DELFTship Free, ver. 3.2

Not exactly. FREE!ship 2.6 (the last version that was built and tested by Martijn van Engeland before he repackaged the software as DELFTship) is still available through sourceforge:

http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=140466

It includes several useful features (crosscurves of stability, for instance) that are not available on DELFTship Free (which is a limited form of DELFTship Pro -- printing and import/export are disabled).

Recently, a naval architect in the Ukraine has been releasing "enhanced" versions of FREE!ship under the name FREE!ship Plus. While he has added some interesting features, it is somewhat unstable and the developer has not been very respectful of the Gnu Public Licensing under which FREE!shp was released. In particular, he has neglected to give any credit whatsoever to the original developer of the program.

[frank pedersen]

I saw a posting some time ago on how to use Hulls on a Mac, but I did not follow it up as I had an older OS version. Can anyone help me on that? The Carlson website (www.carlsondesign.com) indicates it is a Windows program. Newer Macs, I understand, find that no problem, but I am sufficiently software-challenged to need some guidance.

[Bruce Taylor]

I saw a posting some time ago on how to use Hulls on a Mac, but I did not follow it up as I had an older OS version. Can anyone help me on that?

It's a simple program, so I imagine it would run in the popular emulators, such as Parallels, WINE, VMware, or VirtualPC.

Alternatively, you could run it on a PC and link to it with your Mac, via RDC (Remote Desktop Connection).

Finally, if you have an Intel Mac you can use BootCamp to boot directly into Windows.

[JimD]

... It'll take the next several months for me to figure out what to do with it!

I gave up. Too bad because it looks like so much fun but me the kinda guy who needs a step by step manual or a personal tutor standing over my shoulder. Good luck with it.