The latest updates to the CAD software, plus more news from Siemens, SimScale, nTop, Hestus and beyond.
You’re reading Engineering Paper, and here’s the latest design and simulation software news.
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.
