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These products are still in their early stages, but it is clear that the AI wave is reaching 3D modeling as well. It will impact mechanical and civil enginee

by fofoz 17d ago

These products are still in their early stages, but it is clear that the AI wave is reaching 3D modeling as well. It will impact mechanical and civil engineering just as it has impacted software development.

tadasv 17d ago
3d modeling for use in software (games or similar) imo is fine, but I would love to not see this stuff in civil engineering. People without AI are unable to design buildings that don't collapse (e.g. recent NYC apartment highrise), adding AI into the mix will just make things worse.
- yieldcrv 17d ago
  hastily adding AI in into the mix will make things worse its good to be skeptical, better to spur competition and address any limitations to competition functioning quickly
- fragmede 17d ago
  Why do you presume it will make it worse instead of better? Humans, as you point out, could not manage to competently review buildings that don't collapse. Why would adding an additional level of checks (human or AI) do worse than not adding one?
  - tayo42 17d ago
    Ai isn't being used to make competent people better but tries to give supposed expertise to people who don't have skill in that area.
jrflo 17d ago
I don't think so. As a mechanical engineer, CAD is only half of the design process. The other half is actually building and assembling your design and testing/debugging what you've created. You still need the mechanical knowledge and intuition to take something in the physical world, figure out why it doesn't work, and apply that to the CAD design to improve it. It would be incredible to have AI help me model faster, but there's no validation loop like there is with software, so you can't have an agent run wild and endlessly iterate.
- ur-whale 17d ago
  None of the things you list in the "other half" are out of reach for AI. Also: disagree about the lack of validation loop: a) AI can actually build one for you in many cases b) if you give agents an actual validation toolkit, you'll be surprised what AI can do Of course, if you expect to prompt "give me a NURBS model of a complete, working v8 motor" and get a result, then yeah, sure, we're not there yet. I've actually built a bunch of stuff with a combo of astra, blender, openscad and tiny bits of AI written helpers ... giving the AI the proper "hands" to work with the models is key. One particularly useful tool to provide the AI with is to be able to "look" at the model as it iterates on it (measure dimensions, shoot arbitrary rays at it that return exact intersections and normals, see if the object obeys engineering constraints, etc ...). Works pretty well for many, many things and saves a TON of time.
  - jrflo 17d ago
    AI cannot physically build anything in the real world, what are you referring to? That's a huge part of mechanical engineering. And you can give it simulation tools, but those are far far away from accounting for everything in real-world physics. You can simulate very tightly constrained problems, but you can't simulate "assemble this actuator and test it", there are so many more variables in the real world that are not easy to account for in a simulation. If you aren't an engineer that works on physical products, it's hard to articulate just how far from reality CAD and simulations are.
    - matchstickman23 17d ago
      This is how LLMs have been since the beginning. They can be really okay at the most surface level information, but as soon as you dig any bit beyond that, it all falls apart. Inquire any chatbot about something that you're an expert in and it becomes quickly apparent. I'm here for using LLMs to take some of the tedium out of product design/mechanical engineering, but I just haven't seen a good proof of concept yet. It always seems to be some variation of "Design a sphere. Oh wow, this is incredible!"
- altcognito 17d ago

by fofoz 17d ago

tadasv 17d ago

3d modeling for use in software (games or similar) imo is fine, but I would love to not see this stuff in civil engineering. People without AI are unable to design buildings that don't collapse (e.g. recent NYC apartment highrise), adding AI into the mix will just make things worse.

yieldcrv 17d ago
hastily adding AI in into the mix will make things worse its good to be skeptical, better to spur competition and address any limitations to competition functioning quickly
fragmede 17d ago
Why do you presume it will make it worse instead of better? Humans, as you point out, could not manage to competently review buildings that don't collapse. Why would adding an additional level of checks (human or AI) do worse than not adding one?
- tayo42 17d ago
  Ai isn't being used to make competent people better but tries to give supposed expertise to people who don't have skill in that area.

jrflo 17d ago

I don't think so. As a mechanical engineer, CAD is only half of the design process. The other half is actually building and assembling your design and testing/debugging what you've created. You still need the mechanical knowledge and intuition to take something in the physical world, figure out why it doesn't work, and apply that to the CAD design to improve it. It would be incredible to have AI help me model faster, but there's no validation loop like there is with software, so you can't have an agent run wild and endlessly iterate.

ur-whale 17d ago
None of the things you list in the "other half" are out of reach for AI. Also: disagree about the lack of validation loop: a) AI can actually build one for you in many cases b) if you give agents an actual validation toolkit, you'll be surprised what AI can do Of course, if you expect to prompt "give me a NURBS model of a complete, working v8 motor" and get a result, then yeah, sure, we're not there yet. I've actually built a bunch of stuff with a combo of astra, blender, openscad and tiny bits of AI written helpers ... giving the AI the proper "hands" to work with the models is key. One particularly useful tool to provide the AI with is to be able to "look" at the model as it iterates on it (measure dimensions, shoot arbitrary rays at it that return exact intersections and normals, see if the object obeys engineering constraints, etc ...). Works pretty well for many, many things and saves a TON of time.
- jrflo 17d ago
  AI cannot physically build anything in the real world, what are you referring to? That's a huge part of mechanical engineering. And you can give it simulation tools, but those are far far away from accounting for everything in real-world physics. You can simulate very tightly constrained problems, but you can't simulate "assemble this actuator and test it", there are so many more variables in the real world that are not easy to account for in a simulation. If you aren't an engineer that works on physical products, it's hard to articulate just how far from reality CAD and simulations are.
  - matchstickman23 17d ago
    This is how LLMs have been since the beginning. They can be really okay at the most surface level information, but as soon as you dig any bit beyond that, it all falls apart. Inquire any chatbot about something that you're an expert in and it becomes quickly apparent. I'm here for using LLMs to take some of the tedium out of product design/mechanical engineering, but I just haven't seen a good proof of concept yet. It always seems to be some variation of "Design a sphere. Oh wow, this is incredible!"
altcognito 17d ago