Siemens Offers AI-Powered CAD Sketching Tool

Siemens Digital Industries Software has announced a new solution for capturing concepts in 2D. The new NX Sketch software tool improves sketching performance in CAD, the company says. By changing the underlying technology, users are now able to sketch without pre-defining parameters, design intent and relationships. Using artificial intelligence (AI) to infer relationships on the fly, users can “move away from a paper hand sketch and truly create concept designs within NX software. 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,” the company says.

“The ability to make intelligent changes to 2D entities that one imports into the new sketcher is astounding,” said Steve Samuels, CEO of Design Visionaries Inc.

NX offers the flexibility of 2D paper concept design within the 3D CAD environment, and the company claims it is the the first such tool 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.”

Sources: Press materials received from the company and additional information gleaned from the company’s website.

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