Planking diagram

[wefalck]

Is there a piece of software that allows to take planks off a body plan and spread them out flat, i.e. to construct a planking diagram ? I am thinking of developing a planking diagram for a clinker-built boat so that the planks then can be laser-cut.

[Bob Fraser]

Delftship can do this, but it may only be the pro version.  Older versions of Freeship can also do this. Example here.

I haven't tried this!

Bob

[wefalck]

Thanks, that was the kind of thing I was interested in. I will have to investigate and then overcome a very steep learning curve

 

[Dr PR]

wefalck,

 

I have seen some sheet metal design programs that will unfold curved surfaces, but I can't recall the program names.

 

One of the DesignCAD users wrote a BasiCAD macro that unfolds complex 3D surfaces into flat 2D patterns. It even works with things like spheres and toruses. However, the results can be pretty unpredictable with really complex curved surfaces and you may have to repeat the process, starting with different orientations, to get something really useful.

 

I have used it to unfold fairly simple things like truncated cones, curved funnel caps and skirts around the base of funnels (see attached picture) and it works nicely. I haven't used it for hull strakes yet, but when I get around to plating my 1:96 USS Oklahoma City CLG-5 model I will give it a try.

 

Phil

[Jaager]

Wefalck,

What you want is very similar to texture mapping for 3DCG.   Zbrush and Mudbox are two programs that I think include texture mapping as one their modules. I think they are seriously expensive.   I was first introduced to Painter thru Painter 3D - a very old and defunct program that advertised much and delivered very little.  It was supposed to this by being able to paint directly on the 3D mesh and have that transfer to a 2D texture.  It failed.  For a complex 3D figure of an animal,  the ideal was to get a 2D texture of the skin that would wrap around the 3D figure and the area of the polygons on the 2D map be proportional to the surface area of the polygons on the 3D mesh.  I do not know about now, but back when,  the area of the unwrapped and flattened polygons had a fish eye perspective.

 

I am thinking that planking the hull with cardboard that is the same thickness as the planking and carefully tracing each may save time, trouble, money and heart ache rather than trying to use a 3D computer program.

[wefalck]

Thanks for the further comments. In the meantime I had a look (again) at Delftship. It does actually allow to 'develop' plating/planking diagrams even in the free version. The glitch is that you can only export/print it from the 'pro' version which costs a moderate 150€. My problem is that they only make a MS Windows version. Have to try the free version under Parallels on my Mac. Would have loved to have an iPad pro version, as the pen is very useful for editing such things.

 

In the past I have used, of course, the method of marking out the runs of planking on the hull and then taking of the shapes using tracing-paper templates, However, the clinker-built ship's boats I will have to make are going to be only 23 to 50 mm long, so that this is not really practical.

[Gregory]

On 3/10/2020 at 4:50 AM, wefalck said:

The glitch is that you can only export/print it from the 'pro' version which costs a moderate 150€.

Does it actually give you a " flat " rendering on the screen?  You could do a screen capture , and do some size tweaking in a drawing program where you have print capabilities..

[wefalck]

This is exactly what I had in mind doing, before spending the 150€. My screen resolution might be just about sufficient for my miniature  512 dpi laser-cutter.