Ship Hull Modelling

#1


Hello Guys

I’m completely new to Maya, I only downloaded the software yesterday onto my Mac so now my journey begins. I’ve been using Fusion 360 over the past few months, attempting to model a ship hull with a Bulbous bow. However due to the lack of nurbs in Fusion the lofting process was extremely difficult and caused no end of problems.

In the end I was just going round and round ending up with the same errors. I’ve attached a drawing of the hull I’m wanting to design, can someone have a look at this for me and tell me if its possible. The work flow i was thinking of was to design half the hull and mirror the other. My plan is to thicken the hull and then 3d print it in sections and assemble as an RC working model.

I’m a complete beginner with Maya and i’ll be looking on youtube to find tutorials to get to grip with the basics asap! A few folk on other forums have commented to me about buying dedicated ship design software, but I’m a hobbyist and I can’t justify spending thousands of dollars on software such as ship constructor or the likes.

Thanks for looking guys

Martin

#2

If you’ve chosen Maya for its NURBS in order to set up models for 3D-printing, I fear you’ve chosen the wrong application. Maya’s NURBS are pretty much only for simple modeling and for animation/visual effects purposes. They aren’t programmed for accuracy or detailed surfacing, really.

In Rhino 3D however, this ship would be a piece of cake. Even the 3D-printing end of it could be handled internally. Rhino is a dedicated NURBS package, and has many of the tools AutoCAD has as well. I stopped using AutoCAD as a result of Rhino’s feature set.

Don’t get me wrong, you can model this in Maya with NURBS. It just won’t be a solid model for you to export very easily to your 3D printing app. And Maya’s NURBS are just terrible for modeling, in comparison with a dedicated NURBS application. You could of course very easily model this ship using polygon modeling in Maya! Probably even faster that way, all around. So it’s totally doable, just I have doubts your 3D-printing app will play nice with Maya, out of the box.