Why
did we choose Rhino over other packages limited to naval architecture or over general
design software?
Can
one produce regular working drawings that can be printed out for shop use within Rhino?
Is it alright to take your CAD Course even though I am a student at a competing
school?
Should I take the Rhino Level One Course before taking the Computer Assisted
Design Course?
Should I do the YDS main curriculum entirely using manual drafting, entirely in
CAD, or some combination of the two?
Should I take the Computer Assisted Design Course before, after, or during the
YDS main curriculum?
Will I need the special naval architecture plug-ins to add functions to Rhino for yacht design
work?
Answers:
Why did we choose Rhino over other packages limited to naval architecture or over general design software? Rhino is the single package capable of handling the design of yachts and small craft, the normal calculations specific to naval architecture, the production of working drawings, and the production of files for cutting parts, jigs, and even complete plugs and molds using computer controlled equipment. It is also possible to do analysis of the basic engineering characteristics of shapes for use in other programs. Rhino files can be used directly by an increasing variety of special purpose programs such as computer numeric cutting (CNC), finite element analysis (FEA), and computational fluid dynamics (CFD). Further there are an increasing number of special purpose "plug-ins" which work within Rhino to add or streamline special naval architectural, marine engineering, production, and performance prediction functions. While one must be careful as some of these purport to add functions already inherent in Rhino, there are some very good plug-ins. Rhino is easy to use and more cost effective than other packages or combinations of packages. Further it is rapidly being adopted by yacht and small craft naval architectural firms and stock and custom boatbuilding firms of all sizes world wide. There is no doubt that it has already become the standard for use in all phases of marine design and construction. Those trained in marine drafting using Rhino are in great demand in the industry today.
Can one produce regular working drawings that can be printed out for shop use within Rhino? Yes, you can. Curiously the Rhino tutorials do not stress this. Indeed they only demonstrate the relatively primitive automatic 2d drawing function which is quick and useful but not as versatile as the methods we teach. However by transferring information to particular layers, projecting or pulling objects to the construction planes, and adding borders, notes, different line types, shading with varying line widths, etc., you can produce very nice technical drawings. We used to use a mixture of CAD and hand methods. It was easy to use Rhino and a large format printer to print out various views onto which we could superimpose hand drawn elements. However as of Version 4.0 it is quicker and more cost effective to do the entire 2D working drawings strictly within Rhino. Finally using the free Rhino "Evaluation Copy" as a viewer or Adobe PDF anyone with a Windows compatible computer and printer can print drawings to whatever scale the printer allows.
Is it alright to take your CAD Course even though I am a student at a competing school? Yes, of course. YDS was founded to help our profession as a whole to raise our standards of knowledge. We don't exclude anyone. One of our competitors does require the use of CAD in much of their curriculum but does not teach it, and there is certainly no need for them to. We are happy to help out everyone who wishes to acquire an in depth knowledge of the use of Rhino for yacht and small craft naval architecture and we do not desire to take students away from other schools.
Should I take the Rhino Level One Course before taking the Computer Assisted Design Course? People often ask whether they should take the Rhino Level One Course before taking the Computer Assisted Design Course, which teaches you how to use Rhino in yacht and small craft naval architecture. If you normally would teach yourself any new program using the manuals and tutorials, it probably will suffice with Rhino to read the manual, do all suggested tutorials, review the Level One and Level Two manuals on the disk and review the command list. You can then go directly to the Computer Assisted Design Course. If, however, you would normally go to your local continuing education program, community college, university, or training specialist to learn any new program then you probably should take the Rhino Level One Course before starting on the "CAD Course".
Should I do the YDS main curriculum entirely using manual drafting, entirely in
CAD, or some combination of the two? We now encourage students
to do the main YDS
curriculum entirely in CAD. We do not forbid working manually if you don't
mind the extra expense for the manual tools. CAD is more and more
dominant in yacht designing since Rhino came on the scene. Before then CAD was
taking over much more slowly. CAD is even changing, for the first time, the
nature of the profession. Instead of the builder being responsible for lofting
and pattern production, the designer increasingly tends to do everything right
up to the point where machines or people start to cut materials to make building
jigs or molds. With the growing presence of firms which will prefabricate
interior kits, make molds and mold parts, etc., the role of the “builder” has
become much more that of kit assembler. We are just at the beginning of this
era. Those who should consider moving directly to CAD from the beginning
include people living on a boat or people who are going to need to work from a
wheelchair, reclining chair, or powered adjustable “hospital” type bed
due to various physical limitations.
People without physical challenges may take the CAD Course first and
then the main curriculum, or they might take about through Lesson 5 of the main
curriculum first using manual drafting and then do the CAD Course before taking the rest of the
curriculum. However it will always be possible to be a competent yacht designer
using entirely manual drafting, though perhaps not as cost effective or as well
received by the customer. Since it is raising the average level of
education among yacht designers that we primarily aim at we have no objection to
people going entirely through the main curriculum without taking the CAD
Course. We do feel though that we have reached a point in the history of yacht
design where, it has become a handicap
to not know CAD.
Even if one does not expect to use manual drafting much, the basic
mental attitudes and conventions of how you define and conceive shapes and think
about them come from the experience of hundreds of years of manual drafting
development and there are still many times, even when using CAD, that we find
ourselves with a problem too tricky for the built in functions of CAD and find
ourselves essentially duplicating the manual methods on screen to make sure we
are getting the results that we want.
For all the above reasons we would say that the there are
several valid
reasons, other than plain personal preference, that you might decide to take the
Rhino based “CAD Course” first and exclusively use CAD in taking the main
curriculum. First, Rhino is pretty much taking over the entire yacht and
small craft design industry. Second if you have a physical handicap, or if you are living aboard
a boat with no room to set up a really good manual drafting work station.
Third would be if you are comfortable with computers and can afford the “CAD
Course” and software, but add up the cost of the complete manual drafting tools
and decide that you just can’t afford both. The fourth reason would
be if you are a student outside of the United States, which means that time
mailing drawings back and forth starts to get excessive. I would mention
however that the complete cost of our main curriculum, the CAD Course, the
software, the recommended books, and all the manual drafting tools, which
comprises everything you need for a really complete design office is still well
under the cost of our competitors’ courses even without any tools, software, or
additional books.
Should I take the “Computer Assisted Design Course” before, after, or during
taking the YDS main curriculum? Remember that starting both the
study of yacht design and the study of CAD at the same time would mean learning
two deep subjects simultaneously. If this is what you are thinking you probably
should take our “CAD Course” first and only after completing it continue with
the main YDS curriculum.
If you have a
basic understanding of hull lines, however you acquired it, you should have no
problem with the CAD Course. If you don’t, you should read at least
“Understanding Boat Design” by Edward S. Brewer, “Preliminary Design of Boats
and Ships by Cyrus Hamlin, or "Ship and Aircraft Fairing and Development" by
S.S. Rabl. These are all available from our
Fore and Aft Publications.
By suggesting in the CAD Course that you should have a good grasp of
general hull lines “as discussed in our Yacht Design School” main curriculum, we
don’t mean that you actually have to have taken the lessons on lines
development. Only that when we mention the terms and construction used in lines
drawings you should be reasonably comfortable with the concepts. In other words
you should have the general knowledge of lines development that you might have
from at least lessons 3a, 3b, and 4a. We don’t want to make a big thing out of
this. We just mean that the CAD Course should preferably not be studied in
total isolation from other sources of knowledge about yacht and small craft
naval architecture as it is really not intended to teach yacht design per se
but rather how to use this “tool” in yacht design.
The most logical strategy under which you are going to learn CAD in conjunction with taking the main YDS curriculum
is probably
going to be taking the CAD Course first, and
then take the main curriculum only adding manual drafting equipment if you wish.
Will I need special naval architecture plug-ins to add functions to
Rhino for yacht design work? In the past some plug-ins were
sold under confusing names which tended to make students think that they were
produced by Robert McNeel & Associates to "adapt" Rhino for marine design use.
This was not true and Rhino has always had a strong emphasis on built in
functions for yacht and small craft design.
Unfortunately this confusion has placed a heavy burden on us in that
we have to explain over and over to customers as carefully and fairly as we can
what the actual situation is. We are a very busy school and time we must spend
on this issue amounts to time taken from us which should be used for correcting
lessons, and revising our lesson materials to benefit our students.
This has forced us to post this information in this FAQ, which we
would rather not do as printed material like this will be taken negatively by
some people, even though our only intent is to explain, and we prefer to keep
our outlook and our web site firmly positive and proactive rather than negative
and reactive.
We have asked a number of alumni trained by us to test these
plug-ins and add-ons and report to us. So far they all find all these plug-ins too
limiting to be useful in their work. In our opinion these plug-ins are most
suitable for the amateur sailor who likes to tinker with design ideas.
By and large what these plug-ins and add-ons really seem to do is
automate or script processes already inherent in Rhino a little more,
for people who have not been fully trained in the naval architectural uses of
Rhino. Since for anyone who has taken our “CAD Course” these processes are
pretty well in their heads, most of our students wouldn’t bother to use the
plug-ins.
Our “Computer Assisted Design Course”, most often referred to as the
“CAD Course”, is based entirely on Rhino 4.0. It covers virtually everything
that the plug-ins producers advertise that they cover but shows you how to do it
within Rhino rather than having to pay extra.
As an
example, hydrostatic flotation and stability calculations are all built into
Rhino. We teach our students to do extremely accurate stability modeling using
Rhino, which works very well. If you need extremely powerful damaged vessel and
grounding stability calculations, which are generally only used on large
commercial vessels, you can export information from Rhino to the GHS program
done by another company, but for yacht work you won’t need that.
Other
examples are that there is a plug-in which will produce simple hull lines very
quickly. But all of our students who’ve tried it have come to the conclusion
that, while this will produce reasonably usable hulls in a limited range of
types, it tends to keep you from doing really excellent work, especially on hull
forms beyond the most simple round bottom types. We tend to think of it as “fun
for amateurs”.
Another
example is a plug-in which they offer which breaks a model up into smaller files
which can be worked on one at a time while viewing all of them so that
individual files load and save faster and multiple people can be working on one
project simultaneously. However this is essentially the same thing which is
done automatically by Rhino’s Worksession Manager which is an inherent part of
Rhino. Worksession Manager is so simple that it hadn’t occurred to us until
recently that people needed teaching in it, but we have found that some people
don’t seem to perceive its value and how to use it and certainly will teach it
to those who can’t use it intuitively.
All this
means that our take on most naval architecture plug-ins is that if
you have seen them advertise a capability and look at Rhino you normally find
that Rhino can already do that. If you take a list of what most of
these are supposed to do and compare it with what we teach in our “CAD Course”
you would see that you can pretty much do all of this with the standard Rhino
package.
In some things this means you should take our “CAD Course”, in
others it is just a matter of looking up the capability in the Help files or the
on disk manuals.
We don’t want to be overly critical. We’re sure these products work
and do everything that they are advertised as doing. It is just that in the
minds of many students they appear to imply that Rhino doesn’t contain these
abilities and that they are somehow “extending” the power of Rhino which we do
not see that they are.
We believe
this explanation would not be necessary if not for the confusion created by the
producers of these plug-ins. We do not
like to post long explanations about other people’s products, if we are not
enthusiastically and fully endorsing them, but we cannot continue to spend hours
per week going over these matters with students and potential students.