Welcome to the vibe-CAD era. Backflip's X-to-CAD AI platform now supports meshes, photos, videos, and engineering drawings. It's gotten surprisingly good. This is Engineering Paper, and here's the latest design and simulation software news. Last week I noted that Backflip, whose mesh-to-CAD AI platform went live over the summer, has added two new modalities: drawing-to-CAD and photo-to-CAD. I've now spoken with Backflip CEO Greg Mark about the new features and tried them out myself. When I tested Backflip's original mesh-to-CAD AI, I found it impressive but imperfect. That modality offers users the choice of fast mode, which works quickly and costs less, or thinking mode, which takes longer and costs more, but supposedly provides better results. Fast mode provides four CAD options, while thinking mode provides only one. The new modalities, for now, only work in thinking mode. I started with photo-to-CAD, using three pictures I hastily took on my phone of a simple bottle opener: I uploaded the pictures into Backflip, skipping the option to add known dimensions. After nearly 10 minutes, Backflip returned this CAD model: From three shoddy phone pictures, this is a creditable result. But it's not accurate. The tail end of the bottle opener is nonsensically cleaved from the rest of the part, and close inspection reveals the shape of the cutouts and hook are incorrect. The dimensions are also off; the business end of the opener should snugly fit a bottle cap, so it's clear the CAD model is oversized. Though there was nothing to indicate scale in my pictures, Backflip might still have been able to infer the dimensions. For example, Mark explained, "our model has seen iPhone chargers, so... somewhere in its weights are the dimensions of an iPhone charger." I was surprised to discover another new modality that wasn't mentioned in Backflip's announcement: video-to-CAD. I decided to try that next. Inspired by Mark's example, I took this video of an iPhone charger: In about 15 minutes, Backflip gave me this CAD model: Those dimensions, just as Mark said they'd be, are spot on. I can only nitpick about the details. The prongs don't have quite the right shape, and there's a slight inset on the front and back faces that shouldn't be there, but altogether this model is better than I expected. I was even more impressed with Backflip's drawing-to-CAD capability. To test it I turned to TooTallToby.com, which hosts speed modeling tournaments where (human) users convert drawings into CAD. I chose one of the site's practice models to put into Backflip. This is the drawing: And here's Backflip's CAD conversion: It looks correct, but we don't have to rely on our eyes. On TooTallToby, users verify whether they've completed a model correctly by applying the given material (1060 aluminum, in this case) and checking the mass of the part. Backflip doesn't allow you to apply materials, so in order to check it I first needed to pull the model into CAD. Backflip has an Autodesk Fusion add-in that will import the part, with feature tree, directly into Fusion. When I tried it for this part, the add-in only partially recreated the geometry, as you can see in the screenshot below: Since the add-in failed, I downloaded a STEP file of the part instead. STEP files don't have feature trees, but for this test that didn't matter. I was able to import it into Fusion, apply the material, and check the mass. I won't give away the answer (you can check it yourself on TooTallToby.com) but I can verify that Backflip got it exactly correct. As of this writing, 3,133 TooTallToby users have successfully modeled that drawing in CAD. The fastest of them can do it in under five minutes, but the average solve time is 16 minutes and 30 seconds. Backflip AI did it in 7 minutes and 18 seconds. I decided to test Backflip with a more difficult challenge from TooTallToby. You can see the drawing here, or take my word that Backflip's CAD conversion looked exactly correct: To verify its mass, I tried again to bring this model into Fusion with the Backflip add-in. It was better than my first attempt, but there were still discrepancies between the model on Backflip and the one in Fusion (note the tiny holes near the bottom of the bracket, which are absent in Fusion). As before, I had to download the STEP file to apply the material and check the mass. And once again, Backflip aced the test. Its 10-and-a-half minute solve time was even more impressive compared to this drawing's user average of nearly 34 minutes. That was two in a row. I decided to try one last TooTallToby drawing, a multibody wire shelf. This time, Backflip failed, and obviously - it only created one of the seven bodies, though as far as I could tell, it was correct. Despite the final failure, I'm impressed. Not only did two of the drawing-to-CAD models look accurate, they were verifiably exact. They may have been simplistic, made to be modeled and lacking the dust and difficulty of real shop drawings. But the fact that Backflip AI pulled off two perfect CAD models marks, to my mind, a milestone. "People, all of us, haven't internalized how crazy this is yet," Mark told me. Mark, a self-described "AI believer," told me that he believes Backflip will allow 100 million more people to use CAD. "Vibe-CADding," he says, "is about to explode open." Brace yourself. I'll keep testing Backflip to see what it can and can't do, and in the meantime, let me know your thoughts on vibe-CADding at [email protected]. Top Workplaces for Engineers 2027. Engineering.com and Energage have partnered again to determine the best engineering workplaces in the U.S. Nominations for the Top Workplaces for Engineers 2027 are open until November 6, 2026. Arrowfly launches AI for Engineers. Engineering.com's parent company Arrowfly has launched AI for Engineers, an initiative that combines news, research, live events, and an advisory board to help engineers apply AI in their discipline. The first annual flagship event will be held September 20 - 22, 2027 at the M Resort Spa & Casino in Henderson, Nevada. You can register here. Quick hits. * Chipmaker AMD has agreed to acquire World Labs, an AI research lab, for an all-stock transaction valued at approximately $8.2 billion. The deal is expected to close by the end of the year. * Synopsys has announced AgentEngineer, a "portfolio of domain-specific long-horizon agents that can reason, plan, and execute complete engineering workflows from silicon to systems across verification, system validation, implementation, analog, manufacturing, and simulation and analysis domains." * MathWorks has announced the latest version of Matlab and Simulink, release 2026b, which includes the new Simulink Variant Manager, Visual Inspection Toolbox, and Polyspace Test Server plus expanded capabilities across existing tools. * CoLab has announced generative artifacts, a new capability for its engineering AI platform. It doesn't generate CAD, the company says, but rather "other artifacts that engineering teams must mature and approve for release... for example, a Design Failure Mode and Effects Analysis (DFMEA) or a root cause analysis." CoLab says it plans to release a generative CAD product in the first half of 2027. One last link. Check out the latest from Engineering.com senior editor Ian Wright: The speed paradox in 3D printing. Got news, tips, comments, or complaints? Reach me at [email protected].

Multiphysics gets MCP server and Onshape gets SimScale agent. Comsol revealed what's coming to Multiphysics 2027, Onshape users can now use AI to run simulations, and more news from AU 2026. You're reading Engineering Paper, and here's the latest design and simulation software news. First, some follow up from last week's AU 2026, the Autodesk user conference that took place in Las Vegas, Nevada. In my coverage last week, I made two errors regarding neural CAD that Autodesk reached out to correct. I originally wrote: "In 2025, neural CAD was more promise than product. In 2026, that's still true. Haley [Mike Haley, leader of the machine intelligence group at Autodesk Research] said in a media briefing last week that neural CAD has "significantly evolved," yet, as with last year, it's "still an exploration. This is not in the product yet." There are, however, more things to explore. Haley spoke of three neural CAD features for Fusion, AutoTimeline, AutoAssemble, and Project Quill, that represent its evolution." Haley's quote "still an exploration. This is not in the product yet," referred specifically to Project Quill, not neural CAD as a whole. As Autodesk pointed out to me, several features that it considers part of the neural CAD umbrella are live in Autodesk products, including AutoConstrain and Building Layout Explorer. The second correction also relates to Project Quill. It is not, as I stated, a feature for Fusion, but a separate Autodesk research exploration. For more from Autodesk on its AU announcements, check out Autodesk's AI push is actually a pull, a Q&A with Jeff Kinder, Autodesk's executive vice president of D&M, and Sanjay Aggarwal, vice president of industry strategy for D&M. They provide several new details about the AI features announced last week. One more announcement from AU 2026: Backflip AI has expanded its mesh-to-CAD platform to include two new modalities: 2D drawings and photos. Drawing-to-CAD and photo-to-CAD are live on Backflip's site and integrated with Autodesk Fusion through the existing plugin. I'll report more details next week. Comsol announces Multiphysics 2027. Comsol has revealed the details of its upcoming Multiphysics 2027 release, which it says will be available later this fall. Like many other engineering software platforms lately, Multiphysics 2027 will introduce a model context protocol (MCP) server to allow external AI systems to interact directly with the simulation software. Comsol's approach to AI has consistently been to outsource it to third parties - the AI chatbot introduced last year was merely an interface for users to connect their preferred external chatbot, such as ChatGPT or Claude. (In an arena where everyone seems to be recreating the same AI features again and again, this may be the sanest approach.) Another big update is the new Comsol Systems add-on, a block-based interface for systems-level modeling that couples with multiphysics models. Comsol says it will include a library of nearly 5000 ready-to-use components for electrical circuit diagrams, process flowsheets, and more. "Comsol Multiphysics version 2027 will enable users to connect detailed multiphysics models with system-level simulation in one integrated environment, providing deeper insight into the interactions that shape product and process performance," Svante Littmarck, CEO of Comsol, said in the company's announcement. Other additions to Multiphysics 2027 include a new Electric Motor Module; macOS and Linux support for the Application Builder; a new time-periodic solver for faster simulations in plasma, electromagnetics, and MEMS applications; and other general enhancements. I'll report more when the new version is released later this year. SimScale on Onshape. SimScale has a new integration for Onshape, PTC's cloud CAD platform. The SimScale Engineering AI Agent, available through Onshape's app store, can set up and run SimScale simulations directly from Onshape. "From one prompt, the agent can take a CAD model, including geometry that isn't yet simulation-ready, propose an appropriate setup, mesh and run the physics, and report the results back in the same Onshape environment where the model lives," reads SimScale's press release. The Engineering AI Agent can run CFD, FEA, thermal, and electromagnetics simulations. Users can access all agent-run simulations within SimScale for post-processing or refinement. Letter to the editor. "One word sums it up: Enshittification. I don't know who started it but it's about to drive me to FreeCad. I am an early adopter of Fusion (360), with a paid subscription grandfathered in at a slightly lower price. When I started with it, there were several FEA simulations that would run locally. Then they became cloud-hosted and ran more slowly, for a fee, and the tokens expired at the end of the year. That is especially insidious for a small-time user, who might need to answer an occasional problem like "if I apply 25 W on a 1 cm circle on a sheet of stainless steel, how hot will it get?" There's no way to avoid the added cost. Vendors may argue that it is cheaper to buy the tokens than to hire a consultant to do the calculations, but the cost still goes up, and it's basically a zero-sum game with most people losing. I note that one example you give is asking "What is the surface area of this component?" For Fusion (360), at the moment, this is still free, and not much harder than right-clicking a line in the tree. I'll be watching for this to disappear behind a paywall." Quick hits. * BIM developer Vectorworks, owned by the Nemetschek Group, has released Vectorworks 2027. Updates included better textures, improved GPU acceleration, and integrated AI visualization with Nano Banana, among others. * IMSI Design has release the latest version of its CAD software, TurboCAD 2026.1, which includes "approximately 200 improvements, updates, and fixes." * SPEC has released SPECviewperf 15.0.1 Linux Edition, the latest version of its benchmark software for graphics performance in professional applications. It includes a new workload for Blender and updated workloads for Catia, Creo, Maya, Solidworks, and NX. (Back when I was reviewing hardware for Engineering.com, I ran SPECviewperf all the time, albeit on Windows. These workloads are burned into my brain.) * HBK and subsidiary VI-grade have partnered with Movedot to bring AI agents to automotive testing, simulation, and validation. HBK and VI-grade will offer Movedot's AI technology alongside their automotive simulators and test solutions. One last link. If you read only one article today, well, presumably you've just finished it. But if you have time for one more, I strongly recommend Kenneth Wong's How real engineers are using AI surrogate models for simulation. Got news, tips, comments, or complaints? Reach me at [email protected].