January 26, 2026
NAPA Release 2025.2 – Shaping the future of ship design
NAPA Release 2025.2 reflects NAPA’s continued commitment to shaping the future of ship design through its two core strategic directions: next-generation user experience and seamlessly extending the 3D workflow.
Discover NAPA Release 2025.2
Through close collaboration with our customers, the newest NAPA release strengthens early-stage design and decision-making, while advancing structural design toward detail design readiness and downstream model reuse.
Together, these improvements help shape the future of ship design by empowering maritime stakeholders to work on a shared, integrated model, supported by the latest regulations and more connected and collaborative workflows — enabling better ship design decisions, earlier and more efficiently.
NAPA Release 2025.2 highlights include:
- Enhanced geometry and loading condition modeling and analysis
- The first version of NAPA Engineer
- Extended structural 3D workflow with new tools and improved performance
Next-generation user experience
For naval architecture, NAPA 2025.2 represents a step toward smarter, more integrated design workflows. This release delivers practical enhancements that simplify hull form and compartment modeling, and accelerate and strengthen compliance analysis.
Geometry design – Smarter hull and compartment modeling
NAPA Designer continues to advance interactive modeling with tools that ease hull form and compartment modeling.
Enhanced visualization makes identifying the overlapping compartments easier than ever, ensuring that designers can identify and resolve conflicts effortlessly. Additional constraints, called hard points, for hull form design allow precise control to limit the hull form to be outside of the critical areas, such as propellers.
The 3D panel model for seakeeping analysis is now available on NAPA Designer, enabling the generation of panel models directly from hull forms in seconds, streamlining hydrodynamic evaluations.
Bulk carriers – Enhanced compliance and usability
The modern and intuitive loading conditions toolset in NAPA Designer supports the bulk carrier loading and analysis now more thoroughly. The latest added functionalities include support for the newest International Grain Code amendments and the IACS one hold damage conditions for longitudinal strength analysis.
Improved usability for loading condition change management and new result analysis tools improve compliance checks and enhance confidence in operational safety.
NAPA Engineer – An integrated design experience
With NAPA Release 2025.2, the first version of NAPA Engineer is now here.
NAPA Engineer marks a significant step toward the next era of ship design and an integrated and modern design experience. While NAPA Designer continues to provide powerful interactive 3D modeling capabilities, NAPA Engineer introduces a modern design and computing platform built specifically for naval architects.
NAPA Engineer combines the trusted calculation capabilities of NAPA with a redesigned and intuitive user experience. Built to streamline ship design from concept to compliance, NAPA Engineer will empower both experienced professionals and aspiring designers to work faster, smarter, and with greater confidence.
In its initial release, NAPA Engineer supports the standard NAPA concepts with a renewed user interface. Looking ahead, future releases will harness the NAPA Node Network to deliver a powerful visual approach to engineering workflows. Even now, the Node Network is available as a trial feature, giving users an early glimpse of the next generation of integrated design tools.
Seamlessly extending the 3D workflow – NAPA Steel
For structural design, NAPA 2025.2 marks a concrete step toward detail design readiness.
Through intensive co-development with shipyards, this release delivers tangible improvements in day-to-day modeling, drafting, and performance, making it easier to refine structural models beyond basic design and reuse them downstream with more confidence.
Design intent directly in 3D – Enhanced sketching capabilities
3D geometry alone lacks the context needed to support designers’ thinking as designs are refined. Enhanced sketching and annotation capabilities allow users to place design ideas, intent, and options directly on the 3D model.
(approx. 700 main objects)
Performance for large and detailed models – Major improvements
NAPA Steel enables engineers to visualize and work with full ship structural models in a single session — even for the largest cruise ships. As model size and level of detail increase, fast and responsive 3D model handling becomes essential for maintaining productive design workflows. In NAPA 2025.2, continuous performance improvements result in up to 50% faster project opening and initial plate-mode visualization, supporting efficient work with large and detailed ship models.
Structural models for downstream use – Improved accuracy
As structural models evolve towards detail design, model granularity and geometric accuracy become increasingly important.
In NAPA 2025.2, enhanced main object splitting enables refinement into independent units, and thickness-aware centering of flanges ensures that web and flange positions match those in production design solid models.
Related enhancements will continue in upcoming NAPA releases.
Hull detailed drawings from 3D – Enhanced drafting
Hull detailed drawings require extensive annotations and sections to fully explain design intent, making them time-consuming to create.
NAPA 2025.2 enhances NAPA Drafting with improved annotation tools and advanced section creation, such as depth views, enabling more accurate hull detailed drawings to be generated automatically from the 3D model.
Besides the highlighted new development, the new NAPA Release includes plenty of user-requested improvements related to geometry modeling, stability analysis and structural design. All the new functionalities, updates and changes in the software have been included in the NAPA Release Notes 2025.2 document, available in NAPAnet, with the installation media.