Maxon to release a Vectorworks plugin for real-time rendering, plus more engineering software (and $$$) news.
Welcome to Engineering Paper. If you’re here for the latest design and simulation software news, you’re in the right place.
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.
