Ship&Offshore | Issue 07/2015
Supporting the life cycle of maritime assets with lightweight 3D formats
VIRTUAL PRODUCT 3D models play an important role in the design of a maritime asset and contain most of the information necessary to drive production. A German maritime industry study underscores the enormous heterogeneity of 3D tools and formats. Besides various other technical and organisational challenges, the use of 3D models is not as efficient and established in the product life cycle as it could be. Professor Dr Uwe Freiherr von Lukas, head of Maritime Graphics at the Fraunhofer Institute for Computer Graphics Research (Fraunhofer-Institut für Graphische Datenverarbeitung – IGD) in Rostock, Germany, presents a lightweight approach in which the accurate 3D geometry is replaced by a visualisation model that has a small footprint and much fewer sensitive data compared with the original CAD model. This derived model offers the chance to improve the use of 3D data over the entire life cycle of maritime assets.