Strategy for big projects

[mmbguide]

hello evevrybody. at first i excuse for my bad english

sorry if coudn't covey my message to you.

1. For a big project, imagine a ship hull, how me must model it. i mean me know that sheet metals have specified dimesions and a ship hull must be made of many sheets. where i must define how many sheets and in which size we need? Do i define these on the drawing with sketch feature or not?
2. in a ship yard a ship will construct in several blocks and finally they must be welded together. in which stage of modeling and preparing drawing i must define the size and range of each block?

a person said me, model you project completely and in drawing stage separate your project in small sections and define all boundry of all blocks.

thank you

[wimann]

I'm inclined to suggest that you create your model in similar steps to how it will be built. In other words, if the ship is built in 5 seperate segments and then welded together, then I would have 5 sub-assemblies (one per segment) in my final product assembly. As for your drawings, it's tough for anyone on here, myself included, to say. Because my company has it's own way of doing things as many others will as well. The best way I can describe what I find to be a good approach is to do top-down drawings. I would start with the overview of what is being built, then break that down into sheets containing sub-assemblies, then break those sheets down into sheets containing components and so on. And by "break down" I mean call out to other sheets. What we tend to do at my job is to have an overall assembly drawing thing have leaders that will call out particular sub-assemblies or parts and tell the fabricator which sheet they need to go to in order to find details on that particular part.

I hope this helps.

[cmharb]

A book could be written on just the subject of handling big projects and another on ship hull building and another on how to incorporate the two.

This is how i would tackle the hull.

I would model it as sketches to create a single surface. Bulkheads would be set as planes as would the decks. 

This is my base model, I would then zone it up, define specific areas ie, engine room, galley, cabins, storage, fuel, etc. and make assemblies for each. Into each of these i would then referance the hull part i made earler.

I would then crate a single assembly into which i would place all the zones and that would be the top level assembly. Then constrain the orgin geomerty of all teh zones together.

At this point the workload can be distruibtied to your team each being given 1 or more zones to model.

For the hull itself, i would derive the base part into another part and cut the surface using the cut tool and make each of these a body then use the 'make conponents' to extract the panels to be made into hull plates. you now have an assembly containing parts to be the hull plats represented as surfaces. Place this assembly into the top level assembly. Then in each of the part files in the hull assembly thicken the surfaces to create the hull plates.

Now, create another part and derive the top level assembly into it. position som planes where you want to divide the hull into its sections and use the split tool to create the sections. again use the make components to create a part for each of the sections.

You will find that as the model gets bigger you will need to increase your computers power.