Technique for drawing bulkheads from drawings?

[davehal9000]

I have a set of three view drawings and want to turn them into bulkheads to use in building a physical model.

Any inexpensive and easy to use computer programs or services that do this?

[Sluis Van Shipyards]

If you already have a program to do the drawings and print them, I've seen people use that sticker printer paper. The print it on there, stick it to the plastic sheet, then cut it out. Then you either have to sand off the sticker or find a solvent that won't eat the plastic, but will clean the sticker off.

[davehal9000]

Trying to develop the plans in the first place. Have 2D drawings, trying to create the bullkhead drawings

[Sluis Van Shipyards]

Ah, I misunderstood. I've seen some 3D programs that will chop the model apart into bulkhead like layers. Hopefully someone else will chime in.

[davehal9000]

Have seen Sketchup mentioned. Would think there has to be something simpler

[kenlilly106]

I'm not aware of any program that can take a set of 2D plans and turn them into bulkheads.

If you had a 3D model then you can cut sections at whatever points you want with the software.

So depending on your skills and what software you have you can either redo the 2D plans into a 3D model and section from there, or make projections of the 2D plans in 2D.

Ken
(drafter/engineer for nearly 30 years)

[naoto]

A 22nd century gadget that would be really handy
http://doraemon.wikia.com/wiki/Mecha_Maker
https://www.youtube.com/embed/PvZpfSPUb ... autoplay=1

[Migmaker]

While its not exactly simple, if you have it, use a computer aided Drafting tool, or could always hand draft. Depending on the views you have, all the information you need is there, you just need to extrapolate it. To make a lofting, I use side elevation and top elevation and a 45 degree intersection line to get what I need. If the subject is symmetrical, only one half is needed, then mirrored to produce a symmetrical bulkhead...side elevation gets vertical slices every time the contours change. So depending on the subject and scale, you would "slice" up the elevation . Each one of these slice lines intrersect with a line on the drawing producing a point from which to extend a line to. So an Autocad program works, or something similar.

[naoto]

You should also be prepared for the occasion that you might come across drawings that look OK in the views, but might not make sense if you try to translate into three dimensions. Take for example the capsule (often referred to as Icarus by some fans -- though the name was never mentioned in the movies IIRC) from the Planet of the Apes. The intersection between the chines and the conical hull is often depicted as a straight line (it should be a slight curve). Similarly, the shapes of the windows and the "cove" (i.e. the "dent" or "cutout" into which the forward viewports go) are often drawn with the wrong shape.

[ajmadison]

Just elaborating on what Naoto is saying. I've seen many drawings on the internet that are not consistent across views, i.e. the front view has drawn features that should correspond to the same feature in the side view, but do not match. For example, there is a 2 view drawing of the AT-TE (clone walker first appearing in Star Wars ep. 2) where, even after correcting the size differences between the front view and the side view, the gun turrets are different sizes and locations. So be careful with those.

Without going into a full blown course of drafting 101, the main lesson, is that a correct 3 view drawing will depict the same objects with matching dimensions, length from top view will match length in the side view, front view width matches top view width, and so on. Lofting cross sections is the extrapolation of the profiles from two of the views at a selected planes orthogonal to those two views. I spent a month learning the drawing language on producing cross sections, and I just tried to distill it into a single sentence. But hope it can you pointed in the right direction.

[Zubie]

I wish I'd seen this topic earlier. Oh well.

The getting bulkheads back from a 3d model is a frequent problem in paper modeling because you can often get the model from modeling sites or from game object extraction, but these can be structurally unsound in cardstock without some backing structure.

I'm a Blender user, so my experience for making internal structures is that some can occur naturally from the creation of the initial model. I described this process in a hull example in a couple of blogposts (Part 1, Hull creation: http://constantvariation.blogspot.com/2 ... khead.html, and Part II, which is the actual bulkheads part: http://constantvariation.blogspot.com/2 ... om-3d.html)
Note that the 3view that I based the hull on was recreated on GIMP specifically for this project and each view was corrected for distortions and variations in the view (scans are often proportionally off or not aligned properly).

Another way to create bulkheads in Blender is to perform Boolean operations using an intersecting object. I don't have any article on this, but since I finally got a working computer again that can run Blender and stuff (yeaayy!! ), I'll see if I can detail this soon, particularly since in Blender this doesn't always work as expected. But I digress...anyhow what happens here:
First you need to have the hull that you want to use as an object. You create a separate object, for instance a narrow box (or better yet a box spaced just far enough for 2 bulkheads. Intersect the hull with this box, and then perform a boolean operation (or in other 3d software, volume operation) on this box, mainly subtract the parts of the box that are outside of this intersection (XOR?). This should leave a nice set of bulkhead planes that fit that hull. Note, 3d software may not take into account material thickness. That will be your job. Nice thing about this method is that if you want an angled bulkhead, just run the intersection at an angle. This is also a good method for sculpting out gun ports, torpedo tubes, windows or whatever out of curved spaces.

A third more work intensive way is to actually fit an object, like a plane, manually, which is what I used to do before I discovered boolean operations.

Almost forgot. If this is being fed into a 3d printer, then whatever, but if not, you will need the paper modeling script for Blender to generate the paper template for these bulkheads.