It may be a vast and sprawling jungle of technology, but if you can hack your way through it the benefits are immense. Today’s design and simulation tools can help you be a better, more efficient engineer, allowing you and your team to get products to market faster while spending less. Using the right tools in the right way can give you engineering superpowers.

Okay, but how? You don’t have to hack your way through the jungle alone. Let Engineering.com’s Design and Simulation Week 2025, kicking off July 14, be your guide.

In this series of webinars, we’re bringing in industry experts to map the territory of design and simulation software—teaching you what tools, trends and techniques will be most valuable to you and your organization. You’ll see how other engineers are leveraging new technology, learn how to plan your own digital transformation and have the chance to interact directly with our expert guests. The only thing you won’t get is lunch (too many ants in the jungle, anyways).

Registrations are now open. Here’s what’s in store for the week:

July 14: Welcome to Design and Simulation Week 2025

12:00 PM Eastern Daylight Time

Welcome to Engineering.com’s Design and Simulation Week 2025, where we’ll help you stay on top of the most exciting developments in engineering software. In this kickoff session, we’ll explore the design and simulation tools, trends and techniques that are shaping new engineering workflows, with a preview of the sessions and speakers you’ll see in the week to come.

What you’ll learn:

• What are the software trends you need to be aware of?
• Is AI really ready for engineering software?
• How can you take full advantage of Design and Simulation Week 2025?

Register here

July 15: The rise of AI agents in engineering: What can we expect?

12:00 PM Eastern Daylight Time

The next revolution in engineering simulation has begun, and AI is increasingly in the driver’s seat.

AI in simulation isn’t just about accelerating physics predictions any longer. AI agents are becoming capable of core engineering work too—handling decisions, performing model setup, and running simulations. But with this new era comes a pressing question: will these powerful tools disrupt the traditional role of engineers, or unlock new levels of human ingenuity?

Join us as we explore the rise of AI agents in engineering and dive into the realities behind the buzzwords. Whether you’re curious, cautious, or actively exploring AI-driven workflows, this interactive session will help you separate fact from fiction—and prepare for what’s next.

What you’ll learn:

• What AI agents are: See how Engineering AI and Physics AI is reshaping the experience of simulation in engineering workflows.
• Real-world use cases: See the concepts put into context with examples of AI agents solving complex engineering tasks.
• A vision and strategy for AI tooling: Understand the value we see this unlocking in the future.

Register here

July 15: Best practices for scaling automation

2:00 PM Eastern Daylight Time

Manufacturers today are under growing pressure to deliver more custom solutions under ever-tightening schedules. Customers are demanding bespoke products, and manufacturers need to find ways to deliver, without taking excessive time away from engineering resources.

The solution? Automation. Makes sense, but where do you begin and how can you scale your automation strategy?

What you’ll learn:

• How automation helps reduce repetitive tasks in mechanical design.
• How to reduce time to market when configuring bespoke products.
• How you can win more business with custom made forms for sales.

Register here

July 16: Physics AI: The engineering revolution you need to be prepared for

12:00 PM Eastern Daylight Time

The Physics AI revolution is happening right now in engineering, and the availability of massive amounts of data together with recent advances in physics-based AI/ML modeling architectures is making it possible.

This revolution will have a meaningful and disruptive impact on how products are designed and how engineering teams are organized and work.

With advances in large-scale data availability, Physics AI models can be trained in specific domains with inference times around 1-3 seconds and accuracy in the predictions of the physics and derived quantities in the range of 1-2%.

What you’ll learn:

• Recent trends in Physics AI including most likely uses in engineering product development.
• How availability of massive amounts of high-fidelity data affects model accuracy for both scalar output quantities and field prediction.
• Domain-specific vs foundational models: How far can we currently push Physics AI models and how can we improve model generalizability?
• See examples of industrial applications of Physics AI.

Register here

July 17: Challenges, trends and opportunities in multiphysics simulation in 2025

12:00 PM Eastern Daylight Time

In this webinar, we’ll present the results from a recent survey of 250 engineers and decision-makers working in high-technology R&D. We’ll cover the 4 key challenges faced with multiphysics simulation and examine industry perceptions around modern platforms and emerging technologies.

Attendees will gain a clear understanding of the current landscape of multiphysics simulation and how new approaches are being implemented to address the common bottlenecks.

What you’ll learn:

• The 4 key challenges faced with multiphysics simulation in high-tech R&D.
• The role of modern platforms and emerging technologies addressing these challenges.
• Real-world examples of how these technologies are impacting simulation workflows today.

Register here

Don’t miss out! Register now for Engineering.com’s Design and Simulation Week 2025.

The post Secure your spot for Design and Simulation Week 2025 appeared first on Engineering.com.

Duro, the cloud-based PLM provider, has relaunched its platform as Duro Design.

Michael Corr, co-founder and CEO of Duro, told me that the change is more than just a new product name. “It’s really a new product… a revolution of what we’re doing, not just an incremental evolution,” he said.

Duro first launched its eponymous PLM platform in 2018, targeting startups and small-to-medium businesses looking for a quick and modern alternative to that jack-of-all-trades, Excel.

“We were very limited in functionality and very automated and opinionated, because we just helped customers implement industry best practices out of the box,” Corr said.

Since then, Corr said, the market for modern PLM tools has evolved. “The level of innovation that’s happening today is unprecedented,” he said, referring both to new hardware companies and the SaaS software startups catering to them. Duro’s customers wanted more capability, configurability and compatibility, and Corr saw that the platform could either adapt or harden into the same kind of stale PLM tool it had been built to disrupt.

“We recognized there was a unique small window to just completely revamp our platform and really meet what this market had evolved to be,” Corr said.

Duro Design is that revamp. Duro’s legacy PLM platform will be phased out and the company will help existing customers migrate to Duro Design.

So what’s the difference? A big part of it, as you might imagine, is AI. Corr describes Duro Design as “AI-native,” a phrase which I asked him to define (lest it come across as marketing fluff).

“Deep refactoring of our platform allowed us to leverage what was becoming the best practices for building AI-based tools,” Corr told me. “We changed our database structure, we changed our API structure, so that AI technologies, LLMs and even generative AI capabilities, were being built natively in the core of our platform, versus being a bolt-on after the fact.”

For example, Duro Design uses AI for natural language search, helping users more easily sort through heaps of design data. Users can also manage their PLM environment with AI by prompting changes to the underlying YAML configuration language (YAML ain’t markup language, if you’re a fan of backronyms). Duro Design also uses AI to analyze change orders and provide predictions and recommendations, according to Corr.

AI isn’t the only difference. Sandwich in a P and you get another tentpole of Duro Design: API.

“Following an API first approach, every single feature that we offer is exposed through the API,” Corr said, in contrast to the more limited API of the legacy platform. “[Users] can reconfigure their account as they wish. They could build their own integrations. They can even build their own front end web client if they wanted to.”

As far as integrations go, Duro offers plenty of its own with add-ins for Solidworks, NX (or should I say Designcenter), Altium 365, Onshape and more.

Speaking of Onshape…

Onshape gets MBD

PTC announced that its cloud CAD platform Onshape will soon be capable of model-based definition (MBD). The feature is in an “an early visibility program with select customers,” according to the press release, “and is expected to be generally available in late 2025.”

What is MBD? There are many bickering definitions for this engineering acronym, but when it stands for model-based definition it refers to annotating a 3D model with manufacturing data such as materials, dimensions, tolerances and the like. It’s an alternative to the standard 2D drawings that everyone loves to hate (but that don’t seem to be going away anytime soon).

“Our new MBD capabilities remove the need to interpret 2D drawings by embedding PMI [product manufacturing information] directly into the 3D model,” David Katzman, PTC’s general manager of Onshape and Arena, said in the release. “And because Onshape is cloud-native, this information is instantly accessible to everyone who needs it, from any device and any location. It’s a major step forward in making MBD practical and scalable for real-world use.”

PTC is showing off Onshape’s MBD this week at the Paris Air Show with their customer Aura Aero (June 16 – 19 2025, Zone B4). Check it out if you’re in town (but you might want to stay away from the Louvre).

Design and Simulation Week 2025

If you’re not already counting down the days to Engineering.com’s annual Design and Simulation week, here’s your 27-day warning.

Running from July 14 – 18, 2025, this series of expert webinars will explore the top trends in engineering software from some of the leading voices in the industry (and me). You’ll learn about AI, automation, multiphysics and how to make the most of modern tools.

Register for Design and Simulation Week now and start counting.

One last link

DiffusionRenderer is a pretty cool new AI-based rendering tool from Nvidia. It takes a 2D video and strips out the geometry and material info in order to plug in different lighting conditions, like changing a scene from day to night. In addition to its creative applications, Nvidia says it’ll help generate synthetic data for robotics training and autonomous vehicle development.

Got news, tips, comments, or complaints? Send them my way: malba@wtwhmedia.com.

The post Duro reboots its PLM platform for AI appeared first on Engineering.com.

PTC launched the latest version of its flagship CAD software, Creo 12. The update brings “hundreds of powerful enhancements to its design, simulation, and manufacturing capabilities,” according to PTC.

Creo 12 enhances the user interface, including adding feature presets that allow users to set their own defaults; composite structure design, including the ability to generate a solid geometry from composite layers; electrical design, including the ability to work on a harness as an assembly; model-based definition (MBD), including enhanced file export to STEP AP242; and more.

Creo+, the SaaS version of Creo, was also updated last month (it gets a new release quarterly). You can watch a PTC webinar on everything new in Creo 12 and Creo+ here.

Digging into Designcenter

Last week I wrote from Siemens Realize Live Americas 2025 in Detroit. I noted the introduction of Siemens Designcenter, “which as far as I can tell is just a new way of referring to Solid Edge and NX.”

Well, I was half right. But there’s more to the story, so if you use either of those programs (or want to learn about an interesting break from CAD industry norms) check out What is Siemens Designcenter?

nTop and SimScale team up for heat exchanger simulation

A new partnership between SimScale and nTop promises to unlock “unprecedented speed and robustness in the simulation and design exploration of high-performance heat exchangers.”

The software developers announced a new integration that allows engineers to import implicit geometry representations from nTop into SimScale. There, they can run flow and conjugate heat transfer simulations directly on the implicit geometry with SimScale’s immersed boundary method (IBM).

“Traditional CAD-to-simulation workflows have always been a major bottleneck in high-performance heat exchanger design—you’re constantly dealing with meshing failures and geometry conversion issues that kill iteration speed,” said Bradley Rothenberg, CEO of nTop, in the announcement. “This native integration with SimScale eliminates that friction—Engineers can now move directly from nTop implicit geometry into a robust thermal and flow solver without the preprocessing headaches, enabling teams to iterate faster and explore design spaces that were previously impractical to simulate.”

This isn’t nTop’s first geometry-to-cloud-based-simulation-pipeline partnership. In March nTop announced a collaboration with Luminary Cloud (and Nvidia) that would take nTop data directly to the simulation platform (and beyond, to Nvidia’s PhysicsNeMo for AI training).

Sketch Helper gets an update

Hestus, developer of the Sketch Helper tool for Autodesk Fusion, has updated said tool to be “up to 3x more responsive,” according to the v0.7.0 release notes.

If you don’t know Hestus or Sketch Helper, I wrote about them back in April when they were hosting a hackathon in San Francisco. Sketch Helper automatically applies constraints to sketches in Fusion (a bit like Autodesk’s own Sketch AutoConstrain tool). With the update, “Sketch Helper now generates recommendations in the background and without interrupting your workflow.”

When I tested it in April, Sketch Helper generated constraint recommendations in real-time—it’s one of the reasons CEO Sohrab Haghighat told me he believes his tool is superior to Autodesk’s Sketch AutoConstrain, which suggests constraints only when users click a button. Given that, I asked Haghighat to clarify the nature of the update.

“Sketch Helper always generated recommendations on the fly. But in bigger sketches where we can propose more recommendations, the computation could cause a momentary interruption in the user’s interaction. This update will resolve that issue by making each group of recommendations available to the user as soon as possible and not causing any interruption for the user,” he wrote in an email.

So there you have it. By the way, Hestus is currently looking for Fusion users to provide feedback on some new features in development—if you’re interested, reach out to Haghighat at sohrab@hestus.co.

Quick hits

• Chinese developer ZWSoft has released ZWCAD MFG 2026, the latest version of its mechanical design software. (If you remember reading about this already, you’re thinking of the beta release in April.)
• Vectorworks, part of the Nemetschek Group, launched a preview of a new AI assistant that will answer users’ Vectorworks questions. (If you remember reading about this already, you’re thinking of the AI assistant in Nemetschek’s Allplan and Graphisoft.)
• CoreTechnologie has teamed up with Leo AI to enable “advanced AI-powered analysis of CADx data on the Leo AI platform through CoreTechnologie’s embedded software development kit (SDK) 3D_Kernel_IO.” (If you remember 3D_Kernel_IO, it was just updated. I haven’t covered Leo AI before, so if you use it or make it, I’d like to hear from you.)

One last link

What do you do with all your old software when you’re trying to modernize? Manufacturing engineer Andrei-Lucian Rosca explains on Engineering.com: Dealing with legacy software during a digital overhaul.

Got news, tips, comments, or complaints? Send them my way: malba@wtwhmedia.com.

The post PTC launches Creo 12 appeared first on Engineering.com.

First announced at CES 2025 in January and reintroduced at the Siemens Realize Live 2025 user conference in June, Designcenter is the new name for Siemens’ portfolio of mechanical design software. It goes beyond branding—the new moniker comes with increasing interoperability and “aggressive” new pricing that Siemens believes will serve everyone from a single-person design startup to a major enterprise OEM.

Engineering.com dug into Designcenter to find out what it is, what it isn’t, and what it means for Siemens users.

The origins of Siemens Designcenter

All the major CAD developers have dual offerings: a premium CAD program for large enterprises and a more affordable option for the mass market. Dassault Systèmes has Catia and Solidworks, PTC has Creo and Onshape, Autodesk has Inventor and Fusion, and Siemens has NX and Solid Edge.

Siemens has something else, too: Parasolid, the modeling kernel that they use in both NX and Solid Edge and license to several competitors (including Solidworks and Onshape), and D-Cubed, Siemens’ geometric constraint manager, also used in-house and licensed to competitors. You could call these components the heart of CAD software.

With both NX and Solid Edge built on the same underlying technology, Siemens saw an opportunity for closer integration.

“Our overall move for Designcenter is to try to take a more aggressive position in the marketplace, as one offering, and not be seen as a split offering between NX and Solid Edge,” George Rendell, VP of NX Design at Siemens, said in a presentation at Realize Live 2025. “Based on the same technology and the same solid modeling kernel, Parasolid, we can scale and flow the data… from single seat customers to large enterprises.”

As Siemens’ mechanical design brand, Designcenter slots in neatly next to Siemens Teamcenter (for PLM), Simcenter (for simulation), and Opcenter (for manufacturing operations management). Siemens’ executive vice president of PLM products, Joe Bohman, hinted at Realize Live 2025 that more Siemens “center” brands may be coming soon (Lifecenter, perhaps?).

What does Siemens Designcenter mean for NX and Solid Edge?

Siemens NX and Siemens Solid Edge aren’t going anywhere—yet. Both products exist as part of the Designcenter portfolio. Siemens hasn’t announced any specific plans to phase out those brands, but Rendell revealed that, at some point, Designcenter will be the name of Siemens’ CAD software.

“For those of you who still call NX Unigraphics… I think you can see where this is headed,” he said to a chuckling audience (clearly many of them remembered that name change from 2002). “Over time, we will slowly stop using the NX product name.”

Presumably, the same is true of Solid Edge—it would defeat the purpose to phase out one brand but not the other.

What’s available in Siemens Designcenter?

For now, Designcenter includes all of the Solid Edge and NX product offerings, including the software-as-a-service (SaaS) versions labeled with an X. It will offer the same four tiers that NX X does: Essentials, Standard, Advanced, and Premium. (NX X Essentials is a browser-based version of NX formerly called Zel X and the latter three tiers used to be known as NX Mach 1, 2, and 3).

Since the X products are all licensed per user, these tiers can be mixed and matched within an organization, Rendell said, with Parasolid ensuring seamless data flow no matter the tier. The browser-based Essentials tier will be included with higher tiers, meaning all Designcenter users can access their data through the web and on mobile devices.

On top of these tiers, Siemens offers more than 100 add-on modules through its value-based licensing program. The token-based system includes modules for generative design, manufacturing, simulation, sustainability and more.

Who is Designcenter for?

Siemens sees Designcenter as a solution for every engineering company, no matter the size, industry, or workflow. Designcenter can be tailored to each company’s needs and it will evolve alongside them, according to Brian Grogan, director of product management for Siemens’ mainstream engineering software group.

“We have a lot of small companies that want to buy the right size product at the right size price point today, but be assured that as they grow as an organization and they achieve more design complexity, that they can scale up in the portfolio without having to worry about the boundaries of the products,” Grogan told Engineering.com.

What will Designcenter cost?

Here are the current prices for Solid Edge X and NX X:

Siemens didn’t announce any specific price changes coming to Designcenter, but Rendell emphasized that more accessible pricing is one of the reasons for the rebrand.

“The feedback we have at Siemens is that sometimes we’re a little hard to do business with, sometimes we’re a little bit expensive,” Rendell said. “So part of our focus here on a scalable message is to be more aggressive at price point.”

There have been a lot of name changes at Siemens recently, and likely more to come with the company’s increased focus on acquisitions. Designcenter, at least, is a change towards harmony. While veteran users may bristle (the same ones who still call NX Unigraphics 23 years later), one thing is undeniable: it’s a lot better than SE X.

The post What is Siemens Designcenter? appeared first on Engineering.com.

This week I’m in Detroit for Realize Live Americas 2025, Siemens’ annual user conference. Siemens Digital Industries Software CEO Tony Hemmelgarn gave the opening keynote yesterday to more than 2,500 attendees at the Huntington Place Convention Center. He kicked off the conference with that famous Heraclitus quote—“No man steps in the same river twice”—before expounding on the Greek philosopher’s lesser known views on digital transformation and the Xcelerator portfolio.

Hemmelgarn’s keynote gave a high level tour of Siemens’ products and plans. He pointed out AI copilots in Teamcenter and NX CAM, discussed immersive engineering with Teamcenter Digital Reality Viewer, gave some love to recent acquisition Altair and acquisition-in-progress Dotmatics, and showed off deluxe customers including Rolls Royce.

Today’s keynote, headlined by Siemens executive vice president of PLM products Joe Bohman, continued that tour. Bohman talked about BOMs (a favorite subject of his), design space exploration with Simcenter HEEDS, electrical design with Siemens Capital, requirements management with Polarion and more. He also announced that Siemens is developing an “industrial foundation model” to train AI in the language of engineering and manufacturing, but we didn’t get many details on that.

Bohman previewed a couple interesting upcoming features for Xcelerator: one, a new personalized home screen for all users to simplify onboarding, and two, embedded AI agents to which users can assign a task at the click of a button. Oh, and he introduced something called Siemens Designcenter, which as far as I can tell is just a new way of referring to Solid Edge and NX.

One more NX goodie: in the NX CAD keynote by Bob Haubrock, senior vice president of product engineering software, we learned that the upcoming 2506 release will allow multiple NX users to work on the same part or assembly at the same time, with live updates between them à la Google Docs.

More to come as I hunt down details in Detroit. If you’re at the show and want to say hi, you can find me by the coffee (or send me an email at malba@wtwhmedia.com).

Arcol launches “Figma for BIM”

Another cloud competitor has entered the building information modeling (BIM) arena. Arcol, a New York-based startup founded in 2021, has launched its web-based platform for architecture, engineering and construction (AEC).

Arcol wants to “bring the magic back to building design,” according to Paul O’Carroll, founder and CEO, in the company’s announcement.

By magic, O’Carroll means an intuitive, playful interface and a web-first workflow that averts versions, foregoes files, and eliminates emails and exports. O’Carroll wants Arcol to be the Figma for BIM (and Figma CEO Dylan Field happens to be an Arcol investor, so the inspiration runs both ways).

So what can it do? Arcol offers real-time collaboration (supporting multiple users and commenting), geometric modeling tools (with familiar sketch and extrude operations), automatic data calculations (live updates of square footage, unit counts, parking, costs, etc.), and a presentation workspace called Boards that synchs with everything else.

Arcol’s data can be exported in the expected ways—STL, CSV, JPG—but there’s also a beta to export models to Autodesk Revit through an add-in. A company spokesperson told me that Arcol will soon support additional BIM platforms as well.

At the moment, Arcol is a conceptual design platform. But the startup plans to go much further in the AEC workflow. Its roadmap includes schematic design, design development and eventually construction documentation.

Arcol is now generally available following a preview release for select firms. The platform starts at $100 per user per month, though enterprise pricing is also available.

So… anyone else feeling déjà vu?

Everything about Arcol reminds me of Motif, another web-based BIM platform that launched in March. Both platforms are taking aim at what they see as the outdated BIM goliath (cough, Revit). Both are explicitly taking cues from Figma and similar web-based tools. Both are coming out of the gate with a focus on conceptual design and real-time collaboration. Both have a synchronized presentation workspace (Motif’s is called Frames). Both have an add-on to send data directly to Revit (though Motif’s is bidirectional, while Arcol’s appears to be one-way). Both are planning more BIM add-ons soon (Motif currently supports Rhino as well as Revit).

And, most interestingly, both have Amar Hanspal, former co-CEO of Autodesk. He was an early investor in Arcol and is now the CEO of Motif. What’s that story, I wonder?

I asked O’Carroll about Hanspal over email, and I’ll quote his deft reply in full:

“Amar was an early angel investor in Arcol and later started Motif, which was unexpected. He is no longer involved in Arcol. But Motif’s entry into the space is just further proof that the industry is really hungry for innovation — it validates our market opportunity. We are confident we are delivering the best experience for today’s designers, and we’ll keep raising the bar for building design. Others will have to answer for themselves.”

Quick hits

• IMSI Design has released TurboCAD 2025, claiming more than 70 updates to the latest version of the CAD software. Those updates include performance boosts, interface improvements, and “AI-driven tools to enhance rendering workflows, provide design insights, and facilitate part creation” in the form of the optional TurboCAD Copilot Professional plug-in.
• 3D software developer CoreTechnologie has updated its 3D_Kernel_IO SDK for CAD conversion. The SDK now supports the latest formats for Catia V5, Solidworks, NX, Creo and more.
• Siemens Digital Industries Software announced two new offerings of its PCB design software, Xpedition, to cater to small and medium businesses. PADS Pro Essentials is a basic version of the software for $999/year and Xpedition Standard is for intermediate users at $2,999/year. Based on the clashing names, it seems Siemens is doing a bit of portfolio spring cleaning. Siemens notes on the Xpedition landing page that “PADS Standard, PADS Standard Plus, PADS Professional and PADS Professional Premium are still current products in our portfolio,” and that users can contact the company for additional seats.

One last link

CIMdata’s Peter Bilello, an Engineering.com contributor and fellow Realize Live attendee (hi Peter!), with In the rush to digital transformation, it might be time for a rethink.

Got news, tips, comments, or complaints? Send them my way: malba@wtwhmedia.com.

The post Realizations in Detroit and the “Figma for BIM” appeared first on Engineering.com.

Sometimes I worry that I’m going to run out of AI startups to write about. Thankfully, they keep popping up like heads on a Hydra. Today I draw my pen on Toolpath, an AI startup focused on CAM automation.

“We’ve built an AI engine to remove the things users do in CAM software today,” Toolpath CEO Al Whatmough told me.

Namely: Toolpath automates toolpath creation.

In a manual CAM workflow, Whatmough explained, users specify their toolpaths tool by tool and setup by setup. It requires know-how and patience. Even for a simple part, generating a toolpath could take an experienced user 30 minutes or more.

Toolpath does the whole thing for you in a couple minutes.

It works like this: Users upload their CAD part to Toolpath’s browser-based interface. Toolpath’s AI, with knowledge of the user’s available set of tools, generates a full 3-axis milling strategy along with a cost and cycle time estimate.

“A part that’s manufacturable for one person is not manufacturable for another. And so this looks a lot like DFM [design for manufacturability], but it’s not really. It’s DFM that’s specific to the context of the capabilities a given shop,” Whatmough said.

If a part can’t be machined with the user’s existing tools, Toolpath will suggest some from a database of “tens of thousands” of tools from different vendors, according to Whatmough.

Whatmough showed me a brief demo of the AI platform in action. He pulled in a part (the bike clamp top shown above), and without doing anything else Toolpath began analyzing it. About a minute later, it had generated the full machining strategy, with four setups and six tools from Whatmough’s library, with a cost estimate of $176.95.

A toolpath is just that, and to turn it into a real-world part you still need a CAM system to simulate it and generate the CNC machine code. Toolpath lets you send the generated toolpath directly to Autodesk Fusion, where users can take it to production in the Fusion CAM workspace. In the demo, Whatmough imported the bike clamp’s machining strategy into Fusion by copying and pasting a key into the Toolpath add-on, which recreated the setups natively in Fusion.

Whatmough knows Fusion CAM well—he was Autodesk’s director of product management for manufacturing until he left in 2021. But there’s nothing about Toolpath that requires Fusion, he said, and Toolpath plans to support other CAM systems too. Eventually, it may outgrow them entirely.

“When we’ve done our job right, we will have a closed loop system that goes the whole way to the machine,” Whatmough said.

Toolpath is already raising eyebrows and capital in the CAM world. Whatmough says the platform has a couple hundred paying subscribers (the base subscription is $1,500 per year), and last week it closed its latest investment round with funds from toolmaker Kennametal, CAM developer ModuleWorks, and venture capitalist firm Leaders Fund. Toolpath didn’t disclose the value of this round, but to date the company has raised approximately $20 million USD across three rounds, according to a company spokesperson.

I found this particular head of the AI Hydra to be less hyperbolic than most. Toolpath is focused on automating something with reproducible steps and a clear solution. Whatmough says the AI is trained to “play the game of machining a part, similar to the way you train an AI to play the game of chess.”

A chess-bot might make a bad move, but it won’t ever make an illegal move, and likewise Whatmough says the Toolpath AI won’t hallucinate. “It’s a more explicit [AI]… you have to remove all the geometry of this part, and these are the tools you get to use. It’s how I do it as a programmer today.”

I was impressed with Whatmough’s demo, but I always take demos with a grain of salt. The end users get the final say, so if you’re one of them, please share your thoughts on Toolpath in the comments or message me directly at malba@wtwhmedia.com.

Quick hits

• Siemens Digital Industries Software has entered into an agreement to acquire Excellicon, an EDA software developer focused on developing, verifying and managing timing constraints. Siemens didn’t disclose the terms of the deal.
• AMD announced new GPUs and CPUs at Computex 2025 in Taipei last week. They include the Radeon RX 9060 XT and Radeon AI PRO R9700 graphics cards and Ryzen Threadripper 9000 Series processors.
• Reality capture company XGrids announced a new plugin for Autodesk Revit that integrates XGrids’ Lixel CyberColor (LCC) technology with the popular BIM platform. LCC combines lidar data with 3D Gaussian splatting and “automatically generates spatial models that capture both visual fidelity and structural accuracy,” according to the XGrids press release. LCC for Revit will be available on the Autodesk app store by the end of May 2025.

One last link

Engineering.com senior editor Ian Wright writes about his latest obsession in I love lattices.

Got news, tips, comments, or complaints? Send them my way: malba@wtwhmedia.com.

The post AI comes for CAM: Toolpath generation, custom DFM and quick cost estimates appeared first on Engineering.com.

Today’s top story comes from Maxon, developer of the rendering app Redshift and 3D modeling and animation software Cinema 4D, among others.

Maxon announced last week that it’s on a mission to improve architectural visualization. How? With a series of new plugins for real-time rendering in popular BIM platforms, starting with Vectorworks.

“Maxon is obviously a leading 3D software provider, mostly in broadcast, motion graphics, game and visual effects,” Maxon CEO David McGavran told me. “We also have quite a large amount of high-end architectural visualization artists as customers. And so with that, we’ll be expanding our solutions that we bring to market, and we’ll be talking about it for the first time in June with one of our sister companies, Vectorworks, at AIA.”

That’s the AIA Conference on Architecture & Design 2025, which will take place in Boston from June 5 – 6. Maxon and Vectorworks, both subsidiaries of the Nemetschek Group, will be showing a demo of the new plugin at booth 563.

There’s more to come. McGavran said Maxon is planning to develop plugins for other popular BIM platforms after Vectorworks.

For more details from my interview with McGavran, read Maxon to release Vectorworks plugin for real-time BIM rendering.

The Engineering $alary $urvey

Engineering.com has released the results of its 2025 Engineering Salary Survey, conducted in partnership with our sister publications Design World, EE World, Fluid Power World, The Robot Report, Medical Design & Outsourcing, and R&D World.

“With data gathered from nearly 600 full-time engineers, this survey reveals more than just salary figures. It explores benefits preferences, vacation norms, job roles, and career trajectories, offering a detailed snapshot of the professional engineering landscape,” wrote editorial director Paul J. Heney in his announcement of the report on Engineering.com.

You can download the full report here.

The nTop Computational Design Summit

Software developer nTop has announced its 2025 Computational Design Summit (nCDS), set for June 24, 2025 in Los Angeles. It’s a one-day event featuring speakers from Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Siemens and more.

“nCDS is an opportunity to showcase how computational design and AI are changing the way products are developed and brought to market—helping engineers shorten design cycles, improve performance, and meet increasingly complex requirements,” Bradley Rothenberg, nTop founder and CEO, said in the company’s announcement.

If you’re nTerested in nCDS, you can register here.

A P-1 AI update

A few weeks back I covered P-1 AI, a startup working on engineering artificial general intelligence (AGI). I still can’t tell if the whole thing is a joke or not.

There’s some more evidence for not with a new demo video from cofounder Aleksa Gordić, in which he shows Archie (the name of P-1 AI’s agent) helping design a residential cooling system. It’s not a particularly convincing demo, but at least it’s more than we got with the Archie demo hype reel from the company’s launch.

On the other hand, there’s also more evidence that P-1 is just putting one on. Not only does the new demo continue to propagate the preposterous claim that P-1 AI is working to build Dyson spheres (in addition to more boring things, like HVAC prisms), but the startup has released a new, even more terrible promo video called Archie biopic, in which “Archie” “narrates” “his” “life” over AI generated images culminating in, you guessed it, a Dyson sphere.

If P-1 AI is genuine, the irony is rich. Even as the startup ostensibly works to replace human engineers, it’s in full recruitment mode, putting out calls for “cracked engineers” to join the team (and crack themselves right out of a job).

One last link

Here’s a revealing look at the state of generative AI from R&D World editor-in-chief Brian Buntz: 8 reasons all is not well in GenAI land.

Got news, tips, comments, or complaints? Send them my way: malba@wtwhmedia.com.

The post Maxon’s archviz mission, and engineering salaries revealed appeared first on Engineering.com.

The developer of 3D modeling, animation, and rendering software, including Cinema 4D and Redshift, announced today that it will release dedicated plugins for several BIM platforms, starting with Vectorworks.

“The key feature that we’re bringing to this product is real-time visualization,” David McGavran, CEO of Maxon, told Engineering.com. “It’s going to be faster than anything you’ve ever seen before from Redshift.”

Redshift, but real-time

Redshift is Maxon’s GPU-based rendering software, used in several industries for production-quality renders. The new plugin is based on Redshift, but it’s adapted for real-time rendering in the Vectorworks environment. Architects will be able to fly through their scenes with Redshift-quality rendering occurring in real-time, according to McGavran.

The actual rendering quality will depend on users’ hardware. Like Vectorworks, the plugin will work on both Windows and Mac. The more powerful the computer, the higher the real-time rendering quality. McGavran says he’s been demonstrating the plugin on two laptops, an M4-equipped MacBook and a Windows PC with a high-end Nvidia GPU, and both provide full rendering quality.

Integration with Redshift and Cinema 4D

Users of the plugin will be able to move directly between Vectorworks and Maxon’s 3D software: Redshift for final production rendering and Cinema 4D for scene modeling and animation. The scene will sync back and forth with the host application, according to McGavran, who says the plugin will help expose architects to Maxon’s robust 3D design tools.

“You’ll just be able to press a button and it’ll just open up your scene directly into Cinema 4D,” McGavran said. “You’ll be able to do your walkthroughs, all of your visualization, your movie exports, your still exports, using these tools that we’ve built for years and years inside of Cinema 4D.”

Architects may be particularly interested in Maxon’s 3D asset library, which McGavran says includes thousands of high-quality 3D assets that will “empower those architects to quickly decorate and make their scene beautiful at the highest quality inside of their tool of choice.”

For example, architects could decorate their scene with photorealistic flora. In January, Maxon acquired Laubwerk, a developer of 3D tree and plant models that will be available through the plugin.

What’s next after Vectorworks?

Maxon will show a preview of the Vectorworks plugin at the AIA Conference on Architecture & Design 2025, taking place in Boston, MA from June 5 – 6, at booth 563.

The plugin will go into beta for select Vectorworks customers this summer, but Maxon has not announced an official launch date. The company also hasn’t announced how the plugin will be priced or licensed, but McGavran asserted that it “will be a very, very price-competitive product.”

Both Maxon and Vectorworks are owned by the Nemetschek Group. So are Graphisoft and Allplan, other BIM developers for which Maxon may eventually develop a plugin. McGavran wouldn’t commit to any specific plugins beyond Vectorworks, but said “we want this to be available to all architects” and mentioned other popular BIM tools including Autodesk Revit, SketchUp, and Rhino as possible integrations.

“We’re very excited to expand our base of artists closer to the architect side of the world,” McGavran said.

The post Maxon to release Vectorworks plugin for real-time BIM rendering appeared first on Engineering.com.

Tech Soft 3D, a developer of engineering software development toolkits, has announced VizStreamer, a new tool to enable web-based CAE visualization.

“The move to the web has not been as fast as expected,” Andres Rodriguez-Villa, Tech Soft 3D’s director of CAE, told me.

There was a time not long ago, before AI was the biggest trend since slice planes, when it seemed like every engineering software platform would wind up online. And while there are now plenty of web-based engineering applications, there are still a lot of tools that remain bound to the desktop. With VizStreamer, Tech Soft 3D wants to help them get to the web.

As its name suggests, VizStreamer is a tool for rendering CAE data in a web browser. It uses WebGL, which Tech Soft 3D says will reduce operating expenses by eliminating the need for server-side GPUs, and it does not require comprehensive rewrites of an app’s core functionality.

“You can actually take your existing desktop application and feed the streamer and get up and running on the web quite quickly,” Rodriguez-Villa said.

VizStreamer doesn’t do all the work of bringing CAE applications to the web. Rodriguez-Villa said developers will still need to build a user interface and send events back to the application, but he estimates that VizStreamer will save at least half of the effort of developing for the web.

“It’s a hard thing to take into account the specifics of CAE to make it as lean as possible—you don’t want to stream unnecessary data. So we have a lot of expertise there,” Rodriguez-Villa said.

The new tool is part of Tech Soft 3D’s Ceetron Envision SDK, and is available now with on Envision for Web license. Rodriguez-Villa will showcase VizStreamer during a presentation on May 20, 2025 at the upcoming NAFEMS World Congress 2025 in Salzburg, Austria.

God, Autodesk

The company that makes AutoCAD wants you to stop calling it that. That flagship CAD software may be the reason Autodesk exists today, but the company makes other software too. In case you didn’t know, Autodesk software can Make anything.

Wait, sorry, that’s the old slogan—now it’s Let there be anything.

That’s right. The company that makes AutoCAD has transcended its humble origins and is now the preferred software vendor of God Himself. It was revealed not by a burning bush, but a sixty-second ad spot during a Denver Nuggets game:

What an honor for God, whose Earthly form is that of actor Tony Hale, to be involved in one of the “boldest brand transformations” in Autodesk history. Not so bold as to air the ad outside the U.S., but still.

What better way to pay “tribute to the brilliance of [Autodesk’s] customers” than for the Lord to pass over said customers and bestow all His praise upon the company from which they buy AutoCAD. Blessed are the meek, after all.

By the way, I haven’t mentioned this before, but the Buddha is a big fan of this newsletter. Subscribe to reach nirvana!

Siemens introduces new AI agents

Automate 2025 is underway in Detroit this week, and Siemens took the opportunity to announce new AI agents for industrial automation.

According to Siemens, the AI agents will enhance Siemens’ Industrial Copilots, which are the interfaces with which users interact. The Design Copilot in NX, for instance, “enables users to ask questions in natural language, quickly access detailed technical insights, and streamline complex design tasks”—in other words, a chatbot.

The new AI agents will “power [Industrial Copilots] behind the scenes” by working with other AI agents, including third-party agents, which will someday be available on the Siemens Xcelerator Marketplace.

“With our Industrial AI agents, we’re moving beyond the question-answer paradigm to create systems that can independently execute complete industrial workflows,” said Rainer Brehm, CEO of Factory Automation at Siemens Digital Industries. “By automating automation itself, we envision productivity increases of up to 50% for our customers – fundamentally changing what’s possible in industrial operations.” (Why not make it 100%, since we’re just envisioning numbers?)

This reminds me of Dassault Systèmes’ recent introduction of “generative experiences” and “virtual companions,” which make the same distinction between behind-the-scenes AI automation and the user-facing interface. Then, as now, I find it all a bit too abstract—as if some top-down AI mandate is being presented as a concrete solution, details TBD. I’ll try to hunt down those details next month, when I’ll be in Detroit for Siemens Realize Live 2025.

For more from Automate 2025, follow Engineering.com Editor-in-Chief Rachael Pasini, who’s live on scene.

One last link

Should you be worried about microplastics from hospital IVs? Technical thinking: PVCs, IVs, and questioning risk is a thought-provoking new article from Design World’s Mark Jones, who goes against the grain on this topic (see Microplastics are bad, but ignoring science is worse).

Got news, tips, comments, or complaints? Send them my way: malba@wtwhmedia.com.

The post CAE in the cloud and God on Earth appeared first on Engineering.com.

The UK Digital Twin Centre opened last week in Belfast, Northern Ireland, with funding from the UK government and industry partners including Thales UK, Artemis Technologies and Spirit AeroSystems.

The Centre alliteratively aims to help “demystify, demonstrate, and deploy digital twins” for businesses across the UK—particularly small and medium businesses (SMBs) without the resources to trial the technology on their own.

“We want to create a competitive advantage for those smaller businesses by giving them the ability to design, diversify or enhance a product in the digital world without having to go through all the prototyping, iterations and physical building,” Deborah Colville, director of the UK Digital Twin Center, told Engineering.com contributor Tereza Pultarova in an interview before the Centre’s opening. “We want to create a path for them to adopt digital twin technology in a way that is less costly and less complex.”

There’s a lot more to the story, which you can read about in Tereza’s article on Engineering.com: The sandbox solution to digital twins.

Altair to host online simulation conference for SMBs

Speaking of simulation and small and medium businesses, Altair will host a virtual event on May 15, 2025 that aims to highlight how SMBs can benefit from next-gen simulation technology. The event, called ATCx Simulate at the Speed of Design 2025, has been held annually since 2020.

“Simulation is foundational for companies of all sizes looking to reduce iteration loops, improve product maturity, and mitigate risk earlier in development,” said Pavan Kumar, senior vice president of global indirect business at Altair, in the news release. “This event will show how SMBs and SMEs are gaining competitive advantages by embedding CAE and multiphysics simulation into their design processes.”

ATCxSATSOD’25 will include speakers from Altair and its industry partners. The event is free to attend and you can register for it here.

Quick hits

• EDA developer Zuken launched the 2025 release of eCadstar, its PCB design software. The new release includes enhanced library management, batch processing for manufacturing outputs, support for image files in schematics, and other new features, according to Zuken.
• Siemens Digital Industries Software announced its intention to acquire Wevolver, an engineering content platform. According to Siemens, the acquisition will enhance the product portfolio for Supplyframe, a company that Siemens acquired in 2021 and described as “a rich intelligence resource for the electronics industry.”
• Ametek has agreed to acquire Faro Technologies, a developer of 3D scanning technology, for approximately $920 million. In Ametek’s announcement, CEO David Zapico said that the acquisition will complement Ametek’s existing 3D scanning business, Creaform. The deal is expected to close in the second half of 2025, subject to regulatory and shareholder approval.
• The Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation, SPEC, announced the latest version of its workstation graphics benchmark, SPECviewperf 15. The update adds support for the latest graphics APIs as well as new and updated workloads. I used to review workstations for Engineering.com, and SPECviewperf was one of the benchmarks I relied on most heavily. In fact, now that I’m traipsing down memory lane, I recall that the team at SPEC were nice enough to profile me back in 2020.
• Spatial released the 2025 1.0.1 version of its software development kit for 3D modeling and CAD translation. The Dassault Systèmes subsidiary says the updated SDK “reduces manual tasks, increases fidelity in geometry translation, and strengthens its toolset for automated design-to-manufacture and design-to-simulation pipelines.”

One last link

Here’s an analysis of the terms “finite element analysis” and “machine learning” in scientific publications, from 3D modeling startup HelloTriangle: Finite Element Analysis in the AI era: Insights from scientific publishing trends.

The article concludes that FEA will not be replaced by AI, though it acknowledges several limitations with the analysis. Readers can draw their own conclusions. Mine is that the data is interesting, but it doesn’t say anything about how, when, or whether FEA will be replaced by AI.

Got news, tips, comments, or complaints? Send them my way: malba@wtwhmedia.com.

The post SMBs deserve simulation too appeared first on Engineering.com.