Live updates from Dassault Systèmes’ annual user conference.
Welcome to Engineering Paper. Today I’m reporting live from 3DExperience World 2025, Dassault Systèmes’ annual user conference taking place this year in Houston, Texas.
Where to start? Like a good Texas barbeque platter, there’s a lot to chew on.
For one, I don’t think anyone here in Houston has gone thirty seconds without mentioning AI. (There I go doing it again.) AI was enmeshed in everything we heard about during the kickoff keynote delivered by top Dassault executives.
I’m not exaggerating: “This new generation places artificial intelligence at the center of everything we do,” said Pascal Daloz, making his first 3DExperience World appearance as CEO of Dassault Systèmes.
By “new generation,” Daloz is talking about 3D UNIV+RSES, the “seventh generation of representation of the world introduced by Dassault Systèmes.” This chart explains it all:
In a press conference following the opening keynote, Daloz compared 3D UNIV+RSES with two similarly named concepts: Meta’s metaverse and Nvidia’s Omniverse.
“The metaverse is a virtual world which is not linked to reality,” he said, pointing out that 3D UNIV+RSES connect the real and the virtual. Omniverse does that too, Daloz said, but 3D UNIV+RSES offers “the ability to navigate across different scales and disciplines… something that Omniverse cannot do.”
I’ll keep working to unpack 3D UNIV+RSES while I’m here.
Meet Aura, your virtual companion
Daloz’s keynote also introduced two new categories of AI-based services that Dassault calls generative experiences and virtual companions.
Generative experiences are “AI-driven automation[s] for assembly, requirements, design, test, [and] validations, just to give you an example,” Daloz said.
Virtual companions are “AI assistants ready to enhance your skills [and] accelerate your workflow,” Daloz said, adding “these companions are not here to replace you, they’re here to empower you.”
We were introduced to one of those companions: Aura, a chatbot currently available in 3DSwym, a collaboration app within 3DExperience (which itself is integrated in Solidworks, since it connects to 3DExperience). Suchit Jain, VP of strategy and business development at Dassault Systèmes, told me the company is working to integrate Aura into other parts of the platform, such as the Solidworks user forums.
I’ll report more on my conversation with Jain soon, so if you’re not subscribed to Engineering Paper, ask your virtual companion to remedy that.
Lots more AI coming to Solidworks
During the second-day keynote, Solidworks CEO Manish Kumar ran through a list of AI features planned for the CAD platform. Some of them are already available, such as predictive commands and automated drawings, while others were more speculative.
One interesting feature-to-be is generative rendering, where users will be able to quickly generate custom product renders. It reminded me of what Depix Technologies is doing to make designers cry, but we didn’t get many details during the presentation.
We got even less details about some even more interesting AI features. One was generative 3D parts, for which Kumar showed off a picture of a saw handle being converted to a 3D mesh ready for simulation. And on top of that, Kumar teased a mesh-to-3D feature that could turn those meshes into parametric 3D models—someday.
“Whether you are working with 3D scan data, imported mesh files, or legacy CAD models, this feature—” Kumar began to cheers from the crowd, “once fully developed, I must say—will provide a seamless way to transition from complex mesh geometry to native parametric features.”
Stay tuned for more on the AI features coming to Solidworks.
Battling the ghost of Solidworks past
One more item from Houston: Solidworks is celebrating its 30th anniversary this year. The popular CAD program debuted in 1995 and has come a long, long way since then.
I know because I got a chance to use Solidworks 95 on a delightfully retro desk setup in the 3DExperience World exhibit hall. Attendees could earn swag if they completed a modeling challenge in the original software.
It took me a full 10 minutes to make the simplest part imaginable, but I’m now the proud owner of a Solidworks stress cube, some Solidworks socks, a Solidworks 95 collectible CD-ROM (if only I had a CD drive), and best of all, a Solidworks Tamagotchi.
Here’s to 30 more years of Solidworks (though I suspect if Solidworks is still around in 30 years, something will have gone horribly awry with Dassault’s AI vision).
And now, some non-Dassault news…
Altair HyperWorks 2025 now available
Altair has released HyperWorks 2025, the latest version of its design and simulation platform. Among other updates, the new release includes:
- New transformer-based physics predictions models that Altair says will improve simulation accuracy even with limited data
- Altair CoPilot, an AI chatbot in Altair Inspire (in beta)
- New automation tools, including Python APIs
- A new simulation service called Altair DSim for semiconductor functional verification
- New physics models for particle simulation
There’s lots more to check out—you can read the full Altair HyperWorks 2025 highlights here.
NTop acquires Cloudfluid
When Engineering.com spoke with nTopology CEO Brad Rothenberg a few years ago, he asserted that his company’s generative design technology was as “capable of optimizing for fluids as it is for mechanical parts.” The company’s name has since changed (shortened to nTop), but that ambition hasn’t.
Now, nTop has taken a step towards fluid optimization by acquiring German CFD developer Cloudfluid. Their GPU-native CFD solver technology will be integrated into nTop’s design platform, which the company says will particularly benefit aerospace, defense and turbomachinery applications, all heavily dependent on fluid dynamics.
“One of the biggest bottlenecks has always been solving the physics—it takes time to mesh and converge on a solution,” Rothenberg said in nTop’s press release. “Cloudfluid solves this by integrating directly with our implicit modeling core, bringing CFD into the iterative computational design loop.”
One last link
3DExperience World 2025 isn’t the only conference making a meal out of AI. Just in case you haven’t had your fill, my colleague Michael Ouellette covered the recent ARC Industry Leadership Forum in AI and Industry 5.0 are definitely not hype, and my colleague Paul J. Heney previewed Siemens’ plans for the upcoming trade fair in Siemens to focus on AI’s power at Hannover Messe.
Got news, tips, comments, or complaints? Send them my way: [email protected].
