Autodesk Expands Autodesk Generative Design Tech Preview

AGD Now Available to Netfabb Ultimate and Fusion 360 Ultimate Subscribers

By Greg Fallon, VP of Simulation

Back in June when we announced that a tech preview of the Autodesk Generative Design (AGD) service would be available to Netfabb Ultimate users, we were excited to hear from our users how AGD would both turbocharge and streamline their design processes. The results have blown us away.

Now, we are expanding the AGD tech preview to include Fusion 360 Ultimate subscribers. We can’t wait to hear about similar design and process enhancements from this new group of users.

Autodesk Generative Design enables the rapid creation and exploration of design options, empowering design teams to analyze the tradeoffs they could to make along a price/performance curve. In the past, designers and engineers could explore two or three different designs and then run topology or lattice optimization on their chosen solution. With AGD, users can literally generate hundreds of potential solutions to a design problem and explore the variations– including solutions they could never think of on their own.

To be clear, AGD is not topology or lattice optimization – it’s a massive step beyond that.

Traditional optimization focuses on refining a known solution without any notion of manufacturability. By contrast, generative design helps augment the engineer, using the power of the cloud to explore a whole set of previously unknown solutions – and it comes with manufacturability preconfigured as part of the design criteria. The number of simluations engineers are required to run is greatly reduced on the chosen solution because simulation and optimization is built directly into the process.

Netfabb Ultimate subscribers who have had access to the AGD tech preview have created 2,180 design studies and generated 27,886 potential solutions to those studies in under two months. By expanding the AGD tech preview to Fusion 360 users, we are opening new creative possibilities to a wider group of Autodesk customers – and we intend to further expand access to the technology in the future.

Here’s what a one of our early Netfabb Ultimate users had to say about AGD:

“We subscribe to the ‘design thinking’ philosophy where quantity is valued over quality in the ideation phase and we think AGD is a HUGE leap forward in design,” said Kenny Cornett, owner of Innovation Forge. “With AGD, we have brought that philosophy to our CAD work and we can now identify form and function early on and use the natural synthesis from a multitude of design options to find the best path forward.”

“Autodesk Generative Design has opened up new worlds to us. We are now able to evaluate hundreds or even thousands of designs in the time it would have previously taken our design team to come up with ten. The results have been beyond our imaginations with organic-like forms that are difficult – or even impossible – to conceptualize with our previous tools. Autodesk is ahead of the curve with the first product like this on the market. Just like when AutoCAD was introduced 30 years ago, this new paradigm in design is just the beginning of an exciting era of new possibilities and outrageous results.”

The tech preview is available to all Fusion 360 Ultimate users as of today. There are also several technical updates to Autodesk Generative Design beyond the expansion of the tech preview, which are detailed here. We can’t wait to see what new and intricate designs our customers share with us!