✍️ New AI enables people without CAD training to create 3D models from hand sketches

• The AI agent can take a rough hand-drawn sketch and convert it into a full CAD-ready 3D model, collapsing days of drafting into seconds.
• The system can iterate, troubleshoot, and refine designs, and is trained to understand both visual cues and engineering rules.
• The technology gives non-experts access to professional-grade 3D modelling.

CAD software is difficult to learn

Computer-Aided Design, CAD, is the standard method for designing most of today's physical products. Engineers use CAD to transform 2D sketches into 3D models that they can then test and refine before sending a final version to production. But the software is known to be complicated to learn. It contains thousands of commands to choose from. Becoming proficient in the program requires a lot of time and practice.

Researchers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MIT, have now developed an AI agent that can take a rough hand-drawn sketch and convert it into a full CAD-ready 3D model. Trained to understand both visual cues and engineering rules, the system can iterate, troubleshoot, and refine designs, collapsing days of drafting into seconds and giving non-experts access to professional-grade 3D modelling.

Dataset with over 41,000 video examples

The MIT team has created a new dataset called VideoCAD. It contains more than 41,000 examples of how 3D models are built in CAD software. By learning from these videos, which show how different shapes and objects are constructed step by step, the new AI system can now use CAD software the same way as a human user.

When the AI model receives a hand-drawn sketch of an object, it quickly creates a 3D version by clicking buttons and selecting file options, just as an engineer would use the program.

The researchers are working toward creating an AI-driven CAD copilot. Such a tool would not only be able to create 3D versions of a design but also work with a human user to suggest next steps. It would also be able to automatically carry out build sequences that would otherwise be time-consuming to manually click through.

According to the researchers, there is an opportunity for AI to increase engineers' productivity and make CAD more accessible to more people. The technology lowers the barrier to design and helps people without years of CAD training to create 3D models more easily.

Translates commands to mouse clicks

The team's work builds on the development of AI-driven user interface agents. These are tools trained to use software to perform tasks, such as automatically gathering information online and organizing it in a spreadsheet. The research group investigated whether such agents could be designed to use CAD, which encompasses many more features and involves significantly more complicated tasks.

The researchers started from an existing dataset of objects designed in CAD by humans. Each object in the dataset includes the sequence of high-level design commands, such as "sketch line," "circle," and "extrude," that were used to build the final object.

However, the team realized that these high-level commands were not enough to train an AI agent to actually use CAD software. A real agent must also understand the details behind each action. For example: Which sketch region should it select? When should it zoom in? And which part of a sketch should it extrude?

The researchers translated high-level actions into user interface actions. If a human draws a line from point 1 to point 2, this is described in terms of exact pixel positions and mouse clicks, while the correct operation is selected in the program.

From simple brackets to house designs

The team generated over 41,000 videos of CAD objects designed by humans. Each video is described in real time in terms of the specific clicks, mouse drags, and other keyboard actions that the human originally performed. They then fed all this data into a model they developed to learn connections between user interface actions and CAD object generation.

Once the model was trained on this dataset, it can take a hand-drawn sketch as input and directly control the CAD software. It clicks, drags, and selects tools to construct the complete 3D shape. The objects range in complexity from simple brackets to more complicated house designs.

According to Mehdi Ataei, senior researcher at Autodesk Research which develops new design software tools, VideoCAD is a valuable first step toward AI assistants that help onboard new users and automate repetitive modeling work that follows familiar patterns.

Faez Ahmed, Ghadi Nehme, graduate student Brandon Man, and postdoc Ferdous Alam will present their work at the Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, NeurIPS, in December.

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