AbstractThe painting process of large ships is an intense manual operation that typically comprises 9–12% of the total shipbuilding cost. Accordingly, shipbuilders need to estimate the required amount of anti-corrosive coatings and painting resources for inventory and cost control. This study aims to develop a software system which enables the shipbuilders to estimate paint area using existing 3D CAD ship structural models. The geometric information of the ships structure are extracted from the existing shipbuilding CAD/CAM system and used to create painting zones. After specifying the painting zones, users can generate the paint faces by clipping structural parts inside each zone. Finally, the paint resources may be obtained from the product of the paint areas and required paint thickness. Implementing the developed software system to real shipbuilders' operations has contributed to improved productivity, faster resource estimation, better accuracy, and fewer coating defects over their conventional manual calculation methods for painting resource estimation.