Delftship Drawing Modes for Naval Architects

Delftship is light yet powerful ship design software for naval architects capable of developing hull form or ship's lines plan and calculating hydrostatic properties. In my previous post, I discussed about how to design the main deck of a yacht using extrude function of the software.

Now I am going to discuss various drawing modes which the Delftship has to visualize the ship drawings in three dimensional views. On page 14 of Delftship user manual book we can read that the computer ship design software provides five drawing modes which ship designers can use to see the fairness and the 3 dimensional forms of their design.

After designing the hull form of the yacht, I want to visualize it on computer screen in 3D views. The first view is Wireframe. This is the view which naval architects can use to see the boat or ship through its points, lines and edges. The designed ship is presented only with lines. Press Ctrl-W and you will see the yacht that looks like the following drawing

To further explore the Delftship design capability, we can visualize our yacht in Shade drawing mode. The surfaces of our yacht will be represented in solid color, lines and curves. The submerge surfaces of the boat will have different color. Press Ctrl-F to see the boat in Shade Mode.

Naval architects can check whether the surfaces of their design are developable or not. This can be done by pressing Ctrl-D. The boat will look like the following

The above view is needed by the shipbuilder to see whether the hull which naval architects develop can be manufactured or not. Most of the ships' hulls have curve forms in two directions. These are also called compound curves. Naval architects need to design the hull form of the boat in a way that the surface will look green to enable plate development.

The next drawing view to visualize the yacht is the Gaussian curvature. Press the Ctrl-G, then the drawing of the boat will look like the one below:

The Gaussian curvature is used to check the fairness of the hull. Please read page 14 of the Delftship user manual to understand more about this view. The last drawing mode is Zebra shading. To activate it, press Ctrl -E.

Computer ship design software such as Maxsurf, Delftship, Rhinoceros and Autoship are powerful in helping naval architects in visualizing their designs in 3D forms to ship owners. These software have greatly shorten the drawing or design time period naval architects usually spend when executing it manually. by Charles Roring.