How Do I Print Full Size

You will be able to use 3D Boat Design for all your designs needs and also print these out as full scale (if you have the right printer)

Once you have the design developed and saved, click on the  Tools | Develop plates menu choice.  This opens a window that contains the outlines of the planks that make up the boat. On the right you can turn on and off the various planks or highlight them and see statistics on how easy it was for the software to “develop” the plate.  The tool bar at the top is pretty obvious, play around clicking things on and off to see what they do.

When you are ready to create the .DXF file, there are a few buttons that you want to make sure are in the right status.  Turn OFF all the plan lines (waterlines, stations, buttocks, diagonals); you may want to turn the plank name off since it doesn’t transfer anyway.

Most important, make sure you turn off the plate color button which is the one that looks like the dripping paint can.  This turns the image into a lines only image.  The color may not matter, others may know, but the CAD program doesn’t need it.

Now, toward the right of the tool bar is a button that looks like a set of calipers that says “Export visible plates to DXF file”.  Click on this button and a menu pops up letting you name the file and save it into a directory of choice.  Click Save and you are on your way.

Now move to the CAD software.  Open the CAD software and do a File|Open.  Open the DXF file you just saved/created.  You will see an image that looks a lot like the developed plates you just saw in 3D Boat Design

Before you do anything else, you have to scale this correctly to Scale: 1” = 1” (Full size). To this depends on the CAD software you currently use.

Once you save the file it will print in full size mode.

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