A major factor in large ship production is the production output accuracy. The plate development methods in Maxsurf support a range of double curved plate fabrication techniques such as pin-jigs and plate templates. Plate geometry can be exported seamlessly into ShipConstructor or other CAD programs for further detailing.

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Large Ship Design & Production software

The following make Maxsurf very suitable for large ship design:

1. Parametric Transformation

Maxsurf's parametric transformation capability allows you to quickly modify an existing hullshape to required design parameters whilst maintaining fairness. Besides linear variations for length, breadth and depth or a linear search for a greater displacement, you can also carry out searches for design coefficients (including prismatic, block and midship). You can constrain the parametric transformation to the ship's ends so that changes to the parallel midship length is maintained.

2. Hull fairing

The competition amongst operators drives the demand for ships with lower operational cost. With ever increasing fuel prices, the need for hull shape optimisation and in particular resistance minimisation is becoming more and more important. Therefore, there can not be any unfairness in the design. The design philosophy in Maxsurf is all about surface fairing:

NURB principle of variation diminishing curvature
What you see is what you get - honest display of surface curvature, no hidden settings to make the model look better than it is in reality

3. Hydromax Modelling & Anlaysis Capability

By giving the user the option to use surfaces for tank geometry definition, there is no shape of tank that Hydromax can not handle.

4. Workshop Structural Definition

A lot of workshop's functionality originates from custom development for large shipyards that required:

Accurate plate development calculations
Plate forming output such as pin-jigs, templates, sightlines, diagonals etc.
Faired longitudinal stiffener runs
Stiffener inverse bending lines output
Web frame cut-out geometry

Note: It is a common misconception that Maxsurf is only suitable for small to medium sized vessels. There is nothing in the Maxsurf Suite (Hydromax, Workshop, Hullspeed, Seakeeper) that limits the size of the vessel that can be modelled or analysed.

Resouces on this website

See a video of the parametric transformation on the hull of a drill ship.
Read about the variation diminishing principle of B-splines and NURBS surfaces in our Maxsurf manual
Download a container ship sample model and open it in the Maxsurf demo.

Fairing Training videos

These videos on curvature display and fairing tools have been extracted from the Free Online Training resource on this website.

	Displaying curvature on a curve This video will show you the different curvature display tools for curves such as Curvature porcupines and Compress view. The video will also show some steps to manually improve the fairness of this curve. *play*
	Displaying curvature on a surface using rendering This video will show you the different rendering options in Maxsurf and how they can be used to display curvature on a surface. *play*
	Straightening control points This video shows you how to use the straighten command to straighten control points on the deck edge of a containership followed by straightening the Flat of Sides area of the hull. *play*
	Smoothing control points This video demonstrates the use of the Smooth Controls command to smoothen out the hull surface of a trawler. *play*