At Larsen & Toubro I was working in the Marine Engineering Department. The department undertook design of the piping systems inside ocean-going vessels. The design was done using the CAD software, CATIA - V5. Dassault Systems (the company which provides CATIA) did not have a module for extracting pipe manufacturing drawings from the 3D piping models and were depending on third-party softwares. The third-party software was very expensive (around $300,000). Hence the whole process of making a manufacturing drawing from the 3D piping models was being done manually. This was extremely time consuming and also led to a lot of errors in the drawings.
I took the initiative and developed a new tool in CATIA-V5 for automatically extracting manufacturing drawings from 3D piping models.
The video shows the working of the new tool. It was able to reduce the time required for making a manufacturing drawing from around a couple of hours to a matter of few minutes. Manual errors in the drawing extraction stage could be completely avoided.