In shipbuilding, diverse manufacturing techniques for automation have been developed and used in practice. Among them, however, the hull forming automation is the one that has not been of major concern compared with others such as welding and cutting. The basis of the development of this process is to find out how to extract thermal forming information. There exist various methods to obtain such information and the 3D design shape that needs to be formed should be extracted first for getting the necessary thermal forming information. Except well-established shipyards which operate 3D design systems, most of the shipyards only rely on 2.5D design systems and do not have an easy way to obtain 3D surface design data. So in this study, various shipbuilding design systems used by shipyards are investigated and a 3D design surface data extraction method is proposed from those design systems. Then an example is presented to show the extraction of real 3D surface data using the proposed method and computation of thermal forming information using the data.