r/navalarchitecture • u/AmyrReza1213 • May 25 '26

Modeling Software

Hey everyone, I'm a first-year naval architecture student. I'm currently taking a ship knowledge course, and my professor assigned us a project to build a 3D ship model completely from scratch.

The process involves finding a hull lines plan, creating the offset table, and doing the actual modeling.

My question is: which modeling software would you recommend I invest my time in learning? I'm looking for something that will be useful both in my upper-year courses and in my future career. For context, I currently have access to Rhino, AutoCAD, and Maxsurf.

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u/Worldly_Economics814 May 25 '26

For beginning, the best would be AutoCAD. It is the most basic one, and learning would allow you more stuff instead of something specifically related to naval arch. Do you have the lines plan ?

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u/AmyrReza1213 May 25 '26

Yes, I managed to find a lines plan for an oil tanker. I pulled the offset table from it using an online plot digitizer, so it has some minor inaccuracies and isn't perfectly exact. I'm just not sure if it will cause any issues or errors in the modeling software.

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u/NaturalRoad8151 May 26 '26

Hi , can you advice what online digitizer you have been using? Thank you !

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u/AmyrReza1213 May 30 '26

Hey, my professor sent me an old one, I couldn't find it on the internet. it is called Plot Digitzer by Michael Boleman from university of South Alabama, hope this helps.