By Koji Takaba
Koji Takaba
5 Trends in the CAD industry for 2025 and Beyond
The end of the year tends to make us look to the future, and in 3D engineering, staying ahead of the curve is everything. The CAD industry as a whole is constantly changing, and these are 5 of the evolutions we expect to see in the near future. Here are 5 of the most important trends developers, decision-makers, and anyone else in the CAD industry need to know for the next year and beyond.
One File Format Will be Widely Used
Interoperability has been a battle since the early days of CAD, with different organizations and industries creating hundreds of formats. We’ve written about it for Develop3D, and if you work in CAD, you’ve almost certainly struggled with it. We expect to see more consolidation around a single format for the CAD industry.
In other areas, we have seen consolidation around 1 master format. For word processing, the DOC file has dominated. For general document use, PDFs are the most common by far. Even in engineering, 2D CAD has the DWG format. Recent developments by industry leaders support this prediction: Dassault Systèmes and Autodesk have made big pushes for more cloud-based CAD systems that don’t leverage individual files.
Additive manufacturing is a good example of a technical field seeing this change happening. As new applications are released, they are making use of existing formats (usually STL) instead of trying to create their own or leveraging a pre-existing proprietary one tied to a parent organization.
So, which format will reign supreme? There are many options, and we will have to wait and see, but Siemens NX is a promising contender. Siemens provides SDKs for crucial players in the CAD space, including JT and Parasolid. The format supports hybrid modeling (equation surfaces and mesh surfaces), along with both parametric and direct modeling.
