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Validation_Box: third
From: Tom MacNaughton
Date: 11 Mar 2008
Time: 12:43:17 -0500
Remote Name: 66.252.35.219
Yes, you can use CAD to do the entire main curriculum. You can also use manual drafting or any combination. I’ve got to say that these days we really feel that it is getting to be the best idea all around to do the whole curriculum in CAD. Yes, if one is going to use CAD, it had better be Rhinoceros®, commonly known as “Rhino”. There are several reasons for this. First Rhino is pretty much taking over the yacht design industry, and the boatbuilding industry, including being used to cut hull and deck plugs and molds, plus part casting patterns directly from Rhino with CNC machining systems. Second it is a rare yacht design or building business these days that isn’t looking for more Rhino operators. Third the price of the educational license for Rhino is only $195, for a full working copy which you are allowed to use commercially after you complete your training. The only “restriction” on that is that someday, when you want to upgrade to the next whole number version, you will be expected to pay the normal commercial upgrade fee. The upgrade fee itself, and indeed all the Rhino pricing, is in itself a darn good deal. Rhino is more powerful, easier to use, and less expensive than any possible package of competing products that we know of. Fourth we can’t afford to buy and maintain lots of different CAD packages which we don’t use ourselves just to correct lessons. This means that we would only be able to manually correct print outs of working drawings, which is nowhere near as efficient as actually working with the CAD files themselves. Fifth most general CAD programs are not really very suitable to yacht work whereas Rhino is not only versatile at designing about anything but is really extremely good for yacht work with all the capabilities you’ll need to design boats right in the program. If you try to work with most general drafting programs you’d probably then have to buy a separate hull design program as well and your costs would go way up. Westlawn does do things differently than we do. So far as I understand they feel others will teach their students CAD and I believe they just are looking for printed out drawings to correct so the choice of CAD program is perhaps less critical to them. We could be wrong on this as policies can and do change. We have chosen to teach CAD ourselves using Rhino and indeed I understand that a number of students from competing schools take our “CAD Course”. We can then correct Lessons submitted as email attachments. I was interested in your way of looking at 3D modeling as useful to the designer, but stating that you haven’t come across plans that included 3D renderings or assembly drawings. I think that’s an interesting point to think about. It is true that modeling in 3D is easier for the designer. But it also tends to produce much better design work due to one’s ability to evaluate shapes and appearance in 3D and check how everything goes together better so there are less likely to be working drawings with errors in them or boats that don’t look quite as good as they could if modeled in 3D. For years on tricky designs we used to often make physical real world models to evaluate 3D illusions. There is no doubt that 3D CAD makes it much easier to get that heartbreakingly beautiful real world boat that we’re always trying to produce. Therefore even if the drawings are only 2D, surely the client benefits for the exquisite fine tuning that the designer can do in 3D? As for not having come across plans that included 3D renderings or assembly drawings: I suppose that completely 2D drawings have always be quite normal in yacht design work, but virtually all designs that we’ve ever done since 1974 have included at least some 3D drawings. Some are quite fancy but most just show how a tricky bit goes together. Since somewhere around 2001, on every design that we’ve done, the client has received at least some color 3D renderings. Over time these have become more and more photorealistic. We were fairly early adopters of CAD. We probably moved faster to all on screen design than a large number of firms. Nevertheless I think you will find that it is becoming rarer to see a design that doesn’t have at least some 3D drawing work included with it. Remember that the orthographic or 2D views will always be important for “working” or “shop” drawings as the builder will always want to lift measurements off the drawings and the only “3D” type of drawing you can lift any useful measurements off are the “pseudo-3D” isometric drawings. I hope that this helps.