Sketch AutoConstrain and Automated Drawings show that AI doesn’t have to be perfect to save time for CAD designers.
At the annual Autodesk University user conference last October, Autodesk announced three AI-based features coming to Autodesk Fusion: Sketch AutoConstrain, Automated Drawings and Autodesk Assistant.
All these features are now live. Autodesk Assistant is, for the moment, a product support chatbot rather than the interactive helper described at AU. But Autodesk has delivered on AutoConstrain and updated Automated Drawings with new AI functionality, and we got to see them in action.
Engineering.com got a demo of these two new AI tools from Jeremy Stadtmueller, director of product management for Autodesk Fusion, and Bryce Heventhal, senior manager of technical marketing at Autodesk.
Here’s what we learned about Sketch AutoConstrain and Automated Drawings and what else is on the horizon for Autodesk Fusion.
A look at Fusion’s Sketch AutoConstrain
Sketch AutoConstrain—officially known as AutoConstrain in Fusion Automated Sketching—is an AI tool that analyzes sketch geometry to suggest dimensions and constraints. For example, AutoConstrain will add a perpendicular constraint to two lines drawn at right angles. Or a tangent constraint to a line touching an arc. Or a colinear constraint to the midpoints of two circles drawn side by side. And so on.
It’s as easy as hitting the AutoConstrain button in the Fusion sketch menu. The tool generates a list of ways your sketch could be partially or fully defined. You can review the options to pick the one that best matches your intent—or generate more options until you find one that works. Fusion will automatically apply the dimensions and constraints. You can edit all of them manually and continue to use AutoConstrain to update your sketch as often as you like.
The current version of AutoConstrain will not change your sketch geometry. Soon, however, it could have the ability to make slight tweaks, like rounding a dimension from 0.998 to 1. That functionality could exist today, Stadtmueller said, but “people get real nervous when tools change what they’ve drawn.” Autodesk wants users to feel comfortable with AutoConstrain, and that means taking it slow.
Our first question during the demo was, bluntly: Is this a gimmick? The answer was no. For one thing, Heventhal suggests that AutoConstrain will prove helpful for new Fusion users.
“One of the biggest major frustrations in learning CAD is the sketch,” he said. “Fully defining your sketch is… where most people screw up.”
With AutoConstrain, beginner Fusion users could avoid the frustrating errors of over- or underdefined sketches (and their colleagues could avoid the pain of having to fix their rookie mistakes).
What about experienced CAD modelers? These users may imagine AutoConstrain as a kind of 3D Clippy, a tool that aims to be helpful but just gets in the way.
Heventhal, an experienced CAD user, attests otherwise. Even he was skeptical of AutoConstrain at first, but with some slight adjustments to his workflow he realized the AI tool could do most of the work he once did manually to define sketches. Now he’s hooked.
“This is probably my most used [new] tool,” Heventhal said. “I’ll just throw out a couple dimensions, hit AutoConstrain and then go from there.”
It’s still early days for AutoConstrain. Stadtmueller said that right now, the AI is about as good as the best heuristic-based auto-dimensioning tools on the market. But the key difference is that AutoConstrain is always learning, aggregating data from across the Fusion userbase.
“It’s going to get better and better and better,” Stadtmueller said.
Automated Drawings is smartening up
Automated Drawings has been in Fusion since January 2024, and Stadtmueller said the tool “has seen huge adoption over the year it’s been out.”
Fusion Automated Drawings takes a 3D model and generates 2D drawings of the full assembly and each of its parts. That core functionality is based on user templates and heuristics, though Autodesk has now incorporated some AI-based features and plans to add more. The tool now includes an AI model that scans your geometry to classify standard fasteners and exclude them from the drawings.
Running in the cloud, the Automated Drawings process takes only a few minutes, according to Heventhal. In the demo he showed Engineering.com, the tool took seven minutes to generate 53 drawings.
The drawings aren’t perfect. You’ll likely need to edit them up to your aesthetic standards. But yet more automation can help: For any drawing, you can invoke the Auto Dimension tool. Like Sketch AutoConstrain, Auto Dimension will generate a list of ways to arrange the dimensions for your drawing. You can pick the one you like best and manually adjust it from there.
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