nTop Launches Version 5 of its 3D Modeling Software at RAPID + TCT 2024

nTop, the NYC-based provider of design software used for additive manufacturing (AM), has launched nTop 5, the latest version of its flagship platform, ahead of RAPID + TCT 2024 in Los Angeles (June 25-27). The company is also holding its inaugural Computational Design Summit today in LA, beginning at 2 PM PDT.

nTop 5 adds five new integration partners to the company’s nTop Core developer library, a feature that nTop launched in 2023, which builds interoperability between the company’s platform and those of other design software providers. The new implicit modeling kernel at the heart of nTop 5 makes that enhanced seamlessness between platforms possible, and, according to the company, significantly improves both design speed and precision.

New integration partners including Materialise and Autodesk improve nTop users’ slicing and build preparation capabilities, while the addition of cloudfluid and Hexagon to nTop Core improves the platform’s performance for computational fluid design (CFD) related to thermal management applications. Finally, nTop’s partnership with Intact.Simulation smooths out the user’s ability to test multiple iterations of a design.

Attendees of RAPID + TCT 2024 can learn more about nTop 5 at the company’s booth (#1546), or see what’s already been accomplished with nTop software at the nTop + COBRA Golf Dryvebox (booth #1547).

In a press release about the launch of nTop 5, the company’s co-founder and CEO, Bradley Rothenberg, said, “For over 10 years, our mission at nTop has been to help high-performance engineering teams design beyond the limits of traditional software. Our customers have amazed us with the products they’ve developed in nTop — from super-efficient heat exchangers, to ultra-lightweight components for spaceflight and aeronautics, to patient-matched implants that enhance bone fusion, and more forgiving, high-performance golf clubs. nTop 5 is a leap forward in implicit modeling technology and the integration of our new ecosystem partners will expand what our customers will be able to create while streamlining workflows using the tools they know and rely on.”

Stephen Hooper, VP of Design & Manufacturing product development at Autodesk, said, “As they should, today’s product designers and manufacturers expect state-of-the-art computational design tools at their fingertips, seamlessly integrated into their CAD workflows. Connecting nTop and Fusion delivers on that expectation, putting high-performance implicit models designed in nTop where engineering teams naturally work with them.”

As AM has evolved, users generally have two main motivators for leveraging the underlying processes: loosening up the bottlenecks responsible for supply chain disruptions by “democratizing” the manufacturing process, and achieving optimal part performance by creating otherwise-impossible geometries (design for AM, or “DfAM”). For a variety of reasons — which all essentially come down to the expense of successfully executing DfAM — the two considerations are difficult to synthesize.

On the other hand, users’ growing adoption and embrace of software like nTop could do much to speed up the process of bringing down the costs involved in delivering products with innovative designs: including, most notably recently, Bryson DeChambeau’s 3D printed golf clubs. As it becomes easier to automate the design process and to fix problems with products emerging from DfAM before they arise, the more likely it is that the pool of users deploying AM for design-optimization purposes will grow, which is ultimately the only way to unlock the benefits associated with scale.

Images courtesy of nTop