In plain terms: We have reconstructed a ship’s hull structure from 2D drawings
into 3D, end to end, on a real vessel. Next we are taking the same pipeline
inward, to the piping, engines, and smaller parts, and then outward, to reviving
dead 3D CAD files into editable ones.
Where we are
The hull structure milestone is complete. We can take a real vessel’s legacy 2D drawing set and reconstruct its hull structure as an inspectable 3D model, with the evidence and the open questions still attached.Proven on a real ship, not synthetic data
Balclutha, an 1886 steel-hulled sailing cargo ship, reconstructed end to end
from the historical measured drawing set: 71 drawing sheets and 240 survey
data pages.
Reproduced the published research
We extracted and verified the major public reference datasets for 3D ship
reconstruction and reproduced the field’s key published work on turning 2D
ship drawings into 3D hull models.
Every part checked against precedent
Reconstructed components are checked against the vessel’s own type and class
precedent, so unsupported regions get flagged as open questions rather than
generated.
Inspectable, not just rendered
The result decomposes and recomposes without losing identities, and every
numeric claim traces to the measurement record behind it.
What we are building next
1
Internal systems: piping, engines, and smaller parts
The hull is the structure. The work inside it is where most repair scope
actually lives. We are extending the same 2D-to-3D pipeline to internal piping
runs, machinery and engines, and the smaller components that populate a
machinery space.This is harder than hull structure for a specific reason. Hull geometry is
continuous and heavily constrained by naval architecture, which gives a
reconstruction strong priors to check against. Piping and machinery are
discrete, densely packed, drawn in many different conventions, and frequently
modified without the drawings being updated. The evidence discipline matters
more here, not less.
2
Dead 3D CAD into editable, deconstructable models
A large share of vessels do have a 3D file. It is just unusable: a frozen
export, a format nobody supports anymore, or a single fused solid with no
structure, no part boundaries, and no way to change anything.We are building the path from those dead files to fully editable and
deconstructable models: recovering part boundaries and identities, restoring
the assembly hierarchy, and returning geometry that an engineer can actually
modify rather than only look at.The difference matters in repair. You cannot plan a steel renewal, a
modification, or a part replacement against a model you can only rotate.
An adjacent application
The dead-CAD capability is not ship-specific. The same problem exists anywhere physical equipment outlives the software that designed it. Machinery OEMs and suppliers hold large archives of exactly this kind of data: legacy drawings and frozen CAD for parts that are still in service and still need repairing, long after the original design environment is gone. Reconstructing that data into editable, deconstructable models has the same shape as the ship problem and the same trigger, a repair that cannot be planned without a usable model.This is an adjacent direction we are tracking, not a near-term product. The
sequencing is deliberate: prove the reconstruction and reconciliation work with
real vessel operators first. Ships stay the focus.
How to read progress claims in these docs
We try to keep three things clearly separated so the roadmap stays honest:
Hull structure reconstruction is demonstrated. Internal systems and dead-CAD
revival are in progress. The machinery OEM application is exploring.
The Research Log tracks this work week by week, including
the parts that did not go as planned.