DESIGNER BOATS AUSTRALIA- NEWS UPDATE-SOLIDWORKS

DBA has recently purchased new Solidworks software for all the boat design work.

You may ask why change and what is the benefit?

Up to now, DBA has been using Bentley’s Microstation and a little bit of AutoCAD for all its modeling and drawing work. Microstation worked better than AutoCAD and was much easier to operate and solid modeling was much better, AutoCAD was very basic. Recently Microstation upgraded its software and altered / removed a few of the main functions DBA used. The new version went backwards in exporting from 3D to drawings and many of the smooth lines became very distorted and moved in position. The only way to correct this problem was to manually go into the drawing, delete the lines and either trace over a picture of the model shown through into the drawing. This process changed from a few minutes to about two days work.

DBA has also been experiencing problems export the parts through to DXF files for the cutters. Bentley has not been overly helpful and when explained to them about the DXF issues, it was suggested to replace all curved spline lines with smaller circle arcs, yeah right.

The new software Solidworks handles the twisting and curving of the sheets much better. It works on the bases of sketches and surfaces. This now means that the hull sheets will be drawn in and the inside surfaces will be used to cut the internal parts and structure. The graphic side of Solidworks is much better and all the drawings sent through into the 2D drawings are live, so if I update the model, the 2D drawings will automatically update as well. Solidworks also operates on a sketch process and once the base sketch is developed, the boat will alter and update with the base sketch. This alone is a great assistance as design review is done, so the model and all the drawings are updated.

Another benefit is Solidworks works with rendered images all the time, so colors and paint schemes can be added quite easily and the final images are far better than what Microstation was producing. In solidworks is a little camera on the side, once you click on this a snap shot image on the screen is captured and put in the clipboard. Wow this is fantastic and the images are a lot more real looking.

Overall there where many gains moving to Solidworks and the boats from now on will be modeled in Solidworks. The existing boats on the website will remain and not change, as there is a lot of money tied up in producing these boats. Eventually they will be moved across, but that is probably a couple of years away. They are still great boats and they are being cut and built very accurately, just the drawings and images will be slightly different. You will pick the new ones coming through over the next couple of months

Stay tuned and have a look at the couple of images attached to look at as an example