New AI foundation model automatically creates manufacturable digital twins from 3D scans—reducing downtime and keeping plants running

Today, Backflip AI unveiled a new 3D AI foundation model that fundamentally accelerates how manufacturing plants are repaired and improved to prevent costly downtime. The new technology enables anyone to automatically create 3D models of replacement parts from 3D scan data, which can then be quickly manufactured via conventional means like CNC machining or 3D printing.

The company also announced two new tools powered by this AI model: A plug-in for 3D industry giant SOLIDWORKS that translates 3D scan data into fully-featured parts in SOLIDWORKS' native file format, and a web app that converts 3D scans into parametric CAD files. Both tools take what was once a complicated, costly process and collapse it into a simple flow that takes seconds.

Today, when a part unexpectedly breaks in a manufacturing plant and brings down a production line, a maintenance team has to quickly spring into action to get things running again. Assembly lines are composed of tens of thousands of unique parts and it's impossible to stock an entire spare manufacturing plant. If the team doesn't have a replacement they often have to build a part from scratch, requiring someone to:

Manually measure the part and design a digital 3D CAD model
Physically manufacture that part at an internal or external machine shop
Install the replacement and restart the production line
Each of the above steps can take hours and research has shown that industrial manufacturers suffer over $50 billion in losses per year due to unexpected downtime. Backflip's new tools allow manufacturers to short circuit the first step in that process in minutes, cutting downtime by as much as half, and bringing revenue-generating operations back online faster.

A $3 million per hour problem

Automotive manufacturing is a complex, synchronized ballet of tens of thousands of parts, robots, machines, and people, that comes together in a mesmerizing operation of automated assembly. If even one part breaks, an entire production line goes down, at costs that can exceed $3 million per hour in lost output. When production stops, it's all hands on deck to get things back up and running. Backflip's new technology helps manufacturing teams compress the time from broken parts to digital 3D models, which helps get production back online faster.

Beyond automotive, factory maintenance challenges exist across the $44 trillion global manufacturing sector: Many production lines are made by third-party system integrators who don't provide CAD models to their customers, certain components are no longer made, and some factory machinery pre-dates the advent of digital design, especially in aerospace. As a result manufacturing teams spend thousands of hours per year manually recreating 3D models for parts they already have in front of them. Backflip's new tools eliminate this headache, automatically converting 3D scans of these parts into manufacturable CAD files in about a minute.

Opening the door to 3D

Backflip's developments reduce the technical barriers to entry for designers, engineers, and technicians to recreate 3D models of parts that they don't have CAD files for. The tools also make 3D scanning significantly easier, eliminating a long-standing challenge for the technology and those who use it.

"3D scanners map the surface of an object with incredible precision, quickly generating millions of data points, but they produce micro surface textures that can't be manufactured with traditional tools. Our technology automatically converts these intricate surfaces into clean geometries designed for existing 3D CAD and manufacturing software," noted Greg Mark, Backflip CEO and Cofounder.

Teaching 3D design to new users

Backflip's SOLIDWORKS plug-in shows each step in the process used to build a part's geometry and generates a native feature history that users can modify. This enables CAD designers to fine tune the generated 3D model. For new users, walking through the design process helps them understand how the part was created, flattening the learning curve for designing in 3D and bringing more people into 3D CAD programs like SOLIDWORKS.

Building AI for manufacturing

The new AI model was trained on Backflip's synthetic 3D data set of over 100 million unique 3D geometries— the world's largest—which continues to grow at an accelerating pace. Backflip Head of AI Logan Ford added, "These new developments are the result of Backflip's continued R&D investments in neural representation of 3D data. We've paired state-of-the-art AI/ML techniques with the team's deep background in manufacturing to create a really powerful technology foundation. Our additional focus on resource-efficiency enables us to advance rapidly, and yields 60x more efficient training, 10x faster inference and 100x the spatial resolution of existing leading methods."

Backflip's two new tools will be generally available to interested users soon, who can sign up for the 3D scan-to-CAD waitlist on Backflip's website today.

The news follows on notable momentum for Backflip since the company emerged from stealth. It has continued to refine its consumer-facing launch product, a text- or image-to-3D tool that simplifies and accelerates the process of designing 3D printable mesh-based models. The company has also grown its development team and seen a surge in inbound interest from well-known companies across diverse sectors such as manufacturing, consumer packaged goods (CPG), creative industries, and more.

About Backflip

Backflip is pioneering AI technology for the designers and engineers who create the physical infrastructure of the modern world. Its AI-powered 3D design software collapses barriers between idea and implementation and is built for creative problem-solvers across widespread industries, including in mission critical sectors like aerospace, defense, manufacturing and transportation.

Designers, engineers and companies interested in working with Backflip can find out more on the web at backflip.ai.