nTopology Sports New Modeling Architecture and Open Platform nTop

nTopology was featured in a July 2019 article in Forbes Magazine, with a focus on the $20 million the company had raised, led by early-stage VC firm Canaan, to expand its design capabilities and increase its customer base. Brad Rothenberg, nTopology’s 34-year old founder and CEO, spoke with AECCafe Voice about the nTop platform and how it got started and what it provides.

NTop Platform Rocket Nozzle

Rothenberg uses mathematics to improve design. According to the article, using advanced computations, nTop engineering software has created brackets for space satellites and spinal cages for use in back surgery. nTop platform’s customers include Lockheed Martin, Daimler, Disney and the U.S. Department of Defense.

“The big customers are seeing success with the software and they want to deploy it faster and quicker,” Rothenberg told Forbes. “The engineering software space is traditionally run by these big incumbent companies with 40-year-old technologies.”

NTop Bracket Workflow

How did you get from lattice structures in buildings to micro lattices in medical implants?

As an architecture student, architects were some of the first early adopters of 3D printing. And so, the real way I got to what I was doing is through computational design and 3D printing. And also, generative design was a term that was used in architecture very early on as developed by Bentley Systems. And they had a software called Generative Components, which was kind of an early version of a generative design platform.

When I was in school, I started a 3D printing lab, and what drove me away from architecture was actually that everybody in the school was so excited about 3D printing, but for the silliest thing, which was for making tiny, little models of buildings which they would show people. And for me, I was like, “This is crazy. Here I am interested in computational design, and there’s this new technology that’s out that’s capable of making something.” This is technology about fabrication. This was a manufacturing technology. This is not a model-making technology, even though the machine happened to be, then, a model-making machine.

I think it was that point where I was like, “Architecture is not for me. I’m interested in manufacturing.” And so, in working with 3D printing, when you’re actually making a real part, it’s all of this stuff that doesn’t work with the traditional design tools. And that’s because the traditional design tools were engineered at a time when there was no 3D printing and drawings were the paradigm.

Because of that the data models that they used to represent the geometry of 3D objects in the computer, those data models were really built for making drawings. They were abstractions of the part. They weren’t the part itself.  You had all these issues when going to a 3D printer, like the part wouldn’t build properly. There would be holes in it. There would be edges that don’t line up. The edges wouldn’t be straight. They’d be curvy. All sorts of problems. I started writing my own software just to try and solve those problems. And it turns out that the mechanical engineering space and aerospace and medical and electronics design, etc. were also starting to pick up 3D printing and use 3D printing for manufacturing. I switched out of architecture and moved into mechanics, and it was a kind of very natural transition in some ways.

So now architecture is catching up, right?

Yeah.

You’re seeing more advanced manufacturing technology come to market, and architects are moving beyond just drawings. I still think the majority of buildings that get built are built with drawings. Facilities is still a very much drawing-based field and but that’s changing. You have BIM. You have building information and you have all this other stuff, but the manufacturing output is still predominantly drawing.

Even the newer technology, top technologies like BIM, are designed to address, what are we ultimately doing with our drawings? But in a more elegant way.

What does your software do now? What are you working on now?

We just recently released nTop platforms, and so that’s really a new way of engineering lighter weight parts faster, and so it’s really about enabling engineers to start defining their own processes for making parts. And they’re primarily mechanical parts, they’re primarily 3D printing parts, and the main application areas are light-weighting, advanced heat exchangers, anywhere where you see design for 3D printing and the optimization processes to make better performing brackets and aircraft structural components. And so it’s really a design software, but it’s more specifically for kind of automating some of the more– like a traditional mall, you have to do all this manual work like clicking on edges and adding rounds, and our software is really automating a way that works that’s not engineering, and it captures the engineering requirements in the design file.

With the 3D printing, are the 3D printed parts the actual parts you’re using? Or are they models?

No. They’re the actual production components. We have production parts that have gone to space. We have production parts that are actually on Mars. We have production parts that were designed in our software that are flying on satellites. We have production parts that are in people’s bodies. There are medical implants. There are production parts from our software that are in new consumer electronic devices.

There has been this transition period where 3D printing was primarily used to model the parts, and then sometimes they weren’t actually parts that were in use. So what materials are you using now?

Well, the customers are using titanium, aluminum, there’s parts that are INCONEL 718 series. There’s stainless steel components. Cobalt chrome. It’s mostly metal parts that are in production.

What sets nTopology apart from other 3D printing platforms?

The big differentiator for us is our new modeling architecture that’s faster and more reliable, and that’s coupled to an open platform so if you have the control of building your own custom software in it. And so the new modeling technology, it never fails. And it updates really, really fast regardless of how complex your design is. And then an open platform so you can reuse and share– you might have a design process for making a heat exchanger, right? And the traditional adhering tool. If you want to make another heat exchanger that was similar to that one, you’d have to start from scratch again. You can just build off the part because of an engineering tool, it just represents the drawing of that part. In our tool, in our platform, the software file represents the process. It’s more like a computer program, using that part in an output. And so you could change the input like size, shape, heat exchanger architecture, etc. And you get a new part out. So there’s real reusability in the actual work that you do as a software. So you don’t have to redo if this thing works.

You can redo the design in creative ways based on the existing design without having to start from scratch?

Is it a Cloud-based platform?

Both. It’s installed locally, but then it leverages the Cloud for certain parts.

Okay. Cool. Is this the company in which Carl Bass is involved?

Yes. Carl is both an investor in the company and a board member.

There’s a lot of interest in this because it’s really right on the cutting edge, and people are realizing that it’s a real change from how people have been designing for 3D printing up ’til now.

What interest do you have in it so far from various companies?

Lockheed Martin is, I would say, one of our biggest customers. And they’re also an investor in the company. And so they’ve really– they’re fully deployed our software across the board. Our software works really well in large engineering environments. The big engineering companies are either customers or they’re actively evaluating software.

There is a need to develop new materials, but the need to innovate on new structures. And so, yeah, you look at some of the buildings that are built, these advanced structures that are going up with a shift in the Calatrava building in downtown Manhattan. It looks like a stegosaurus. There’s definitely a need for architects and engineers to innovate.  I think it’ll come back. But I think it’ll always be a little bit slower.

Generative Components was an entry for me into the world of generative design.  Now, the big difference is that we have a different underlying data model. A 3D solid is exact, and it’s based on a different type of mathematics, which allows it to be more reliable and faster. With Generative Components, you run into all sorts of errors when you get some more complex structures that don’t line up in the edge issues.

It’s on a different data model?

No, it’s not.  We could bring in Parasolid data, but our modeling technology is entirely new. When you represent a solid body in Parasolid, you’re representing that solid as a patchwork of surfaces surrounding a hollow mix that is empty inside, right? We represent that solid as a mathematical equation so that the equation is giving you a distance. It gives you the distance to the surface, directly. What that means is we can understand all sorts of nice properties about the solid model, which allows it to always stay solid. It allows it to do really complex blending and morphing and transitions and all sorts of stuff that is more a level of complexity than working just with surfaces.

The example I like to give is services were built and you need edges for drawing. The modeling knowledge is built on padding edges and then filling in the space between those edges and surfaces. Now you need more than just having surfaces and edges, we need to fill in all the space in 3D. And so, we represent the part as the actual solid and not just edges and surface, we have edge, surface, and solid, so we understand what’s inside and what’s outside of the part.

Is the nTop platform now available?

Oh, it’s available now. We released a 1.0  in May and will even push out a 2.0 before the end of the year.

Tags: 3D, 3D printing, AEC, architects, architecture, BIM, building, building design, building information modeling, CAD, engineering, engineers, generative design, laser scanning

Categories: 2D, 3D, 3D printing, AEC, architecture, construction, engineering, infrastructure, project management

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