Opinion
Bernard Charlès proposing waste be designed into new products
(All images sourced from Dassault Systemes)
Dassault Systems has a master plan to take them through to 2040. The plan: integrate modeling, simulation, and AI to create virtual twins on virtual universes, through data-mining of design data that’s stored on the cloud.
During his keynote at the 3dExperience 2024 conference, Bernard Charlès, executive chairman of Dassault Systemes, called AI “the big elephant,” because it reinvents the way design is done. Charlès calls AI “the magic of design”; indeed, he referred repeatedly to “magic Solidworks.”
To be clear, when CAD vendors talk about AI, it’s not the currently-popular LLM-based AI like ChatGPT. LLM (large-language models) are essentially syntax assemblers; by contrast, the AI in CAD is more like what we have been calling “rules-based engineering,” a series of if-then statements that check tables of values to arrive at design suggestions, something that’s been around for a decade and longer.
Here is how Charlès envisions AI might work in the future of product design. You speak to magic Solidworks:
- Show me a handle made of recycled materials...
- Use a style that mimics Picasso’s art...
- Sketch the handle...
- Make 3D parts from it.
His use of “recycled” is significant, as he sees the reuse of waste a new, third stage of 3dExperience, following the stages of modeling and customer experience.
Future versions of both Solidworks and 3dExperience will launch every process needed to create 3D objects from sketches, and then generate simulations, automatically. Charlès said AI-based functions are expected to become available over the next twelve months.
AI in HomeByMe
Dassault plans that all of its applications have AI interfaces to create, optimize, and evaluate design alternatives. As an example, Charlès showed how we could use a phone with his company’s HomeByMe app to scan rooms, following which an AI engine generates the rooms in 3D. (Room scanning works only with the four-year-old 2020 Pro versions of iPhone 12 and iPad, unfortunately.)
Once we have 3D models of rooms, we can specify a furnishing style and then choose the types of furniture we want added to rooms, populated from the associated https://home.by.me site. This is a free/for-fee site from which we can access furnishings, store our designs, and see what other users have designed.
All In the Cloud, the Cloud In All
Even though HomeByMe is a consumer example, Charlès used it to illustrate his plan for digital-twin universes: “What some others call 'metaverse' [Facebook], 'omniverse' [nVidia]is at the core of the future of Dassault Systemes.”
With so much design content available on the cloud, he foresees the universes merging together. All the designs that ever have been made, ideas past and future, can be fully exploited by AI, revealing the intellectual property inside -- albeit, Charlès admitted, only when data sharing is authorized.
Executives speaking from the main stage repeatedly reassured us that this will take place amongst the highest level of cyber security levels, which, as we follow the news, know to be surprising low for a surprising high number of governments and corporations.
(Autodesk has described a similar desire to access all of the information inside files customers uploaded to its online storage sites. The company claims to have 40 petabytes of user data, and it would like to trawl through it to train its AI engine -- assuming we give permission.)
Former Solidworks CEO Gian Paolo shocked me stating that it’s no longer sufficient for 3D digital models to be accurate. “We need to bring those models as close as possible to reality, optimizing every ounce of material, and seeing how they affect all aspects of life, before they are realized.”
He explained that the 3Dexperience platform built by Dassault can scale from micro-structures in materials to something the size of a city. The platform uses an AI-based backbone for modeling and reuse. In what sounded like borrowing statements from competitors, he proclaimed that the only companies to survive in the future are those that create better products with higher quality, and taking into account resource use.
A 15-year plan takes fifteen years to implement, and so all of these things will be occurring in stages. An initial one, for example, is combining all multi-physics simulations into a single ModSim package.
What’s New in Solidworks 2025
The next release of Solidworks ships in November, and so it’s fun to see months ahead of time what’s new. The teases saw were just a few of the full list, which is usually revealed in late summer.
Coming (finally!) for drawings is the ability to reload them (after someone else on the network has edited them), instead of the slower process of closing and re-opening them. Sketches in 2D can be converted to 3D with one click; then by double-clicking splines nodes, the editing triad appears.
Instead of creating similar objects that are different in size one by one, you can now array (pattern) them along a path with dimensions that vary the size of each.
You will be able to chamfer and fillet multiple bodies at once through the use of a selection tool that previews your selection options.
The properties of one weldment can now be copied to other elements of 3D structures. During sheetmetal design, you can pick he locations of bend notch points, and Solidworks draws them for you. Notches help sheet metal bend precisely in press brakes.
Large design review mode adds component preview in a second window, so that components can be more easily edited. BoMs [bills of material] can be filtered by display state to reduce their length, useful for projects with very large bills of material.
The team that presented the what’s-new session noted it’s usually the small enhancements that get the biggest applause, such as multi-body chamfers.
What Ralph Grabowski Thinks
That Dassault is able to lay out a 15-year roadmap seems precarious to me, as much can change even in just five years, as was amply illustrated by the last five years.
In an interesting coincidence, executives at both Dassault and Autodesk state that they have already been working on AI for a decade or longer. A closer look seems to indicate to me that what they’ve done is rename an older technology, generative design, as AI. I don’t understand their need to claim “we’ve been doing AI all along.”
Ever since Dassault executives in 2010 revealed the apparently Web-based Solidworks “V6,” they have been very keen to get stolid Solidworks users off desktop-bound Solidworks and into the much more lucrative arena of cloud-based 3Dexperience. At times, executives pleading from the big stage at past Solidworks Worlds became embarrassing for me to watch, as Solidworks users in the audience reacted wanly to their entreaties to switch. Dassault resorted even to changing the name of the event away from Solidworks World.
Dassault kind of flailed, because the 3Dexperience-based software they wrote initially for Solidworks was incompatible, expensive, and confusing. Dassault then seemed to change names and product mixes every few years. It appears now, however, that executives have realized a different approach is needed, and so this year they emphasized the cool things that could be done -- and will be done -- with Solidworks.
Charlès even thanked the audience several times for its “vibrant passion.” Bassi chimed in with what could be considered an apology: “We have been always with you, sometimes arguing, always listening. Again, we offer a radical new vision.”
Nevermind. Bassi concluded that the key is modeling and simulation together, enhanced by AI, and “nobody else has this capability today.”
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