Warning/Note/Pre-Apology: THIS one is one of my longer ones, but please, in all fairness, print it or read it in chunks or when you can devote 5 or 10 minutes to it. Not everything online need be bite-sized small -- some things MUST have several paragraphs to be conveyed.
I read the October issue of Marine Log:
http://www.marinelog.com/http://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/sb/ml1009/#/0and began to again feel intensely concerned that Punch! should incorporate a database tool into the CAD software, maybe across all of its product lines so that any discipline can be handled with a mix-match use of its products.
My personal interests lie in maritime design and designing ships. For my own selfish reasons, i feel that if Punch! ViaCAD or Shark were melded with Delftship, the two could begin to offer alternative software to the expensive behemoths that are in the industry, many locked in by the likes of Autodesk and ShipConstructor. SC uses ms .net framework to send data across LANS or between clients and vendors and others using SC. Rhino has a sundry of plugins (some free, some not, some expensive) for marine design.
Recently, one user in the Punch! forum (about the graphics cards issues, a recent post) commented that he designed something in Rhino and sent his drawing to a shop to produce a machined part and that it ended up with deformations/irregularites of sorts. He reworked the drawing in ViaCAD (? or was it Shark?) and the machined part came out great.
If ViaCAD and Shark are going to take a deeper cut of esoteric design work such as ships, or even into civil and commercial architecture, where line work can be crazy or creative, along with piping and insanely deep BOMS, there is going to be needed a database that captures not only the FINISHED part info but the construction history of that part (or, at least how to make the part since drawing order/history might vary by designer) put into an accessible database so that data can be shared between different vendor apps and help de-imprison some design shops.
I am one who believes a designer's or a writer's works are theirs and should not be locked in a file format the user cannot escape from. Granted, a neutral format may end up losing the most critical parts of the proprietary format, but at least having an inexpensive, high quality, lightweight, easily-accessible database in the back end means the user could be thankful and therefor loyal to a developer. Punch! can become one of those players.
See pages 29 through 32 for the article "Modular Approach to BUilding your ISE" (where ISE is Integrated Shipbuilding Environment).
I've had the privilege of using AutoCAD with ShipConstructor on top of it. It IS powerful, but for small shops i think it is immense overkill. Unfortunately, Autodesk is gobbling up companies dealing with 3D, FEA/FEM, and surface and solid modeling all over the topography. It might be ticked off if Punch! jumped in the fray. But, i say Punch! can offer something similar, probably more friendly, and definitely more reasonably priced. It won't compete with Sener and the likes, but for small shops that cannot or won't be inclined to pay $40,000 or so for ShipConstructor, AND $6,000 for AutoCAD, ViaCAD with collaboration, database, and marine design awareness could be a bargain. For now, many shops not designing much bigger than yachts probably are sticking with Rhino and Orca, but they definitely are not wasting their time trying to use AutoCAD standalone as a ship design tool. From my personal experience, though ShipConstructor is powerful, i think there must be a number of shops which bought it but now find it's too damned powerful, too complicated, and too subdivided and too expensive and they aren't even leveraging their aquisition of it to recover costs.
At work I found it quite damned irritating that some of what is done in ShipConstructor (drawing an area of a ship to do collision/interference detection) could have EASILY been done in ViaCAD -- 3D design in ViaCAD is a whole helluva lot easier (in my mind) than in AutoCAD. If i were a better drafter (or a qualified drafter) and a better communicator, i probably could have made a case (by drawing piping runs, bulkheads, other parts, and then inserting the new material all in 3D in VC or VCP... hell VC 2008 doesn't even seem to know 3D solids CGs information -- not with the ease that VC 2D/3D and VCP do...) to save my employer THOUSANDS of dollars. Not to be vengeful or spiteful, but just to help leverage dollars to tools best suited. If we made a GREATER use of it, SC would be wonderful. But, when i set out (in my hobby, designing naval combatants) to design a part, work on a bulbous bow shape, or import a hull model from Delftship, and manipulate planes references and rotate parts in 3D relative to parts that will not or even will also move or rotate, too, AutoCad is THE LAST THING i'd try to manipulate those things with. I go nuts trying to do so. I tried giving Rhino (less the Orca 3D marine plugins) a fair shake, but it was just too foreign an interface to me, though it's nice having command lines and multi-letter shortcuts/accelerators on tap. Rhino IS powerful, too, but for myself, i cannot afford to use my access to the company's copy for my hobby only to someday lose access to it. Since i don't bootleg software (particularly EXPENSIVE software), i choose to go with affordable, lightweight, easy-to-use software. Even if i never knew of ViaCAD, and even if Rhino were only $100, it would be painful for me to use it without the Orca 3D tools/plugins, and only if the plugins were priced lower, much lower, could i dive in.
People such as myself who design naval or commercial ships could benefit from automated or semi-automated generation of panel stiffeners, brackets, and so on. I don't personally need nesting and labeling features, but if ViaCAD had a database, then the parts and hull features i design could probably be more exportable to other apps where the databases might have converters or even direct translation.
Oh, SQLite:
"SQLite is a software library that implements a self-contained, serverless, zero-configuration, transactional SQL database engine. SQLite is the most widely deployed SQL database engine in the world. The source code for SQLite is in the public domain."
http://www.sqlite.org/http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SQLitehttp://sqlitebrowser.sourceforge.net/http://www.ch-werner.de/sqliteodbc/(Note: I don't work for SQLite, am not a team member, not a contributor, nor have any relationship via which i could realize monetary or other gain, other than emotional gain and reality of an accessible tool to enhance a great application such as ViaCAD, and possibly (if i can afford to buy it) Shark.)
Note: what the MarineLog article doesn't say is that NavisWorks, which is in Oakland, CA, got bought by ZebraSoftware around 6 months ago. I noticed the name change but the same interior from curbside, and later found it was a purchase/aquisition. Whether or not the fundamental mission of the bought company changes remains to be seen, since Zebra (IIRC) is not a marine engineering nor marine-minded company, and that it is a pure-software-type of company into supply chain management.
WHEW... finished (that wiped out about 1/2 of my lunch time)
