Siemens Digital Industries Software announced on June 16, 2020 a new solution for capturing concepts in 2D. The new NX Sketch software tool offers a new way for sketching in CAD. Users are now able to sketch without pre-defining parameters, design intent and relationships, according to the company. Using Artificial Intelligence (AI) to infer relationships on the fly, users can move away from a paper hand sketch and create concept designs within NX software.
The AI solver in the NX AI sketcher automatically finds relationships between design elements, such as the inner circle in this 2D brake rotor and the triangular ventilation holes.
This technology offers significant flexibility in concept design sketching, and makes it easy to work with imported data, allowing rapid design iteration on legacy data, and to work with tens of thousands of curves within a single sketch. With these latest enhancements to NX, Siemens’ Xcelerator portfolio continues to bring together advanced technology, even within the core of modelling techniques, helping remove the traditional barriers users have experienced to dramatically improve productivity.
Analysis has shown that in an average day or workflow, around 10 percent of a typical user’s day is spent sketching. In addition, within current design environments most concept sketching is happening outside of the CAD software due to the level of rules and relationships that must be decided on and built into the sketch by the user up front. Often designers in concept design stage do not necessarily know what the final product may be, which requires a sketching environment that is flexible and can evolve with the design. NX offers the flexibility of 2D paper concept design within the 3D CAD environment, as the first in the industry to eliminate upfront constraints on the design. Instead of defining and being limited by constraints such as size or relationships, NX can recognize tangents and other design relationships to adjust on the fly.
“Sketching is at the heart of CAD and is critical to capturing the intent of the digital twin,” said Bob Haubrock, Senior Vice President, Product Engineering Software at Siemens Digital Industries Software. “Even though this is an essential part of the process, sketching hasn’t changed much in the last 40 years. Using technology and innovations from multiple past acquisitions, Siemens is able to take a fresh look at this crucial design step and modernize it in a way that will help our customers achieve significant gains in productivity and innovation.”
Source: https://www.sme.org/technologies/articles/2020/june/siemens-delivers-artificial-intelligence-powered-cad-sketching-in-nx/
