Siemens Digital Industries Software has a new solution for capturing concepts in 2D. The new NX Sketch software tool revolutionises sketching in CAD, which is an essential part of the design process.

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.

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.

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.

Analysis has shown that in an average day or workflow, around 10% 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.”

Siemens Digital Industries Software is driving transformation to enable a digital enterprise where engineering, manufacturing and electronics design meet tomorrow. 

The Xcelerator portfolio helps companies of all sizes create and leverage digital twins that provide organisations with new insights, opportunities and levels of automation to drive innovation.