Current release

Predictive Recommendations

You wanted this to be improved, and we listened. We’ve embarked on a journey to address both of these challenges with Predictive Recommendations.

Now, Sketch Helper doesn’t just suggest constraints — it predicts your next action and ranks the suggestions by usefulness, based on your state of design and workflow (i.e. your interactions with Sketch Helper). The best suggestion appears right on your sketch (in red), so you don’t have to break your focus to entertain different suggestions to find out the best one.

Interacting with the Predictive Recommendations is EASY.

• Simply Accept by pressing Enter or clicking the green checkmark
• Cycle through alternatives with arrow buttons
• Keep designing without interruption by just continuing drawing, or pressing ESC, or clicking the red X.

It’s seamless, intuitive, and keeps you in the flow.

The best part about this release? Thanks to our new ranking engine, we can now confidently add more types of recommendations without overwhelming you. Sketch Helper shows the top choice immediately, while still giving you control to explore alternatives.

We can’t wait for you to try it and let us know what you are thinking of the new release. This is just the beginning and we’ve only scratched the surface of what’s possible.

Un-interruptive Recommendation Generation

Sketch Helper now generates recommendations in the background and without interrupting your workflow. This improvement makes sketch helper up to 3× more responsive, allowing you to keep designing while insights are being computed.

At Hestus, our goal is to make the engineers’ lives easier. As we introduce more intelligent suggestions into Sketch Helper, we’re committed to ensuring they never come at the cost of performance. This update removes delays previously caused by recommendation generation and lays the foundation for powerful new features on the horizon.

Mirror

Leveraging design symmetry is what designers do to speed up their workflow but manually mirroring geometries can be tedious and error-prone. With our new Mirror Recommendations, Sketch Helper intelligently detects symmetrical patterns in your sketches and suggests mirrored geometries based. Currently, the mirror feature relies on existing “centerlines” in the sketch for recommending mirrored geometries.

This feature simplifies the process of creating new geometries in a symmetric design, allowing you to create mirrored geometries with a single click, improving accuracy and saving time.

The current implementation recommends one geometry at a time. In the future versions we plan to release chain mirror recommendations to further improve user experience and productivity. Please let us know, if you would like us to prioritize working on chain mirror feature over others in our long queue of user requests.

Quad Mirror

Designing symmetrical patterns just got easier. Sketch Helper now supports Quad Mirror Recommendations, identifying two perpendicular centerlines and suggesting symmetrical patterns of four instances.

Whether your centerlines are horizontal/vertical or at an angle, as long as they're perpendicular, Sketch Helper has you covered. This feature reduces the need for using patterning commands, streamlining workflow.

Similar to mirroring, this feature recommends one geometry at a time, but we plan to work on chain geometries to offer even more flexibility and performance boost to your workflow.

UI improvements

We've updated Sketch Helper's UI to make it more intuitive. Suggestions are now grouped into three categories; Constraints, Generative, and Dimensions, each with distinct color codes for easy identification. If you have ideas about how we can make the UI even better, we would love to hear from you.

Auto Dimensioning

Tired of dimensioning your sketches one entity at a time? Or having difficulty finding missing dimensions? Auto dimensioning highlights missing dimensions for lines, circles, and arcs in the sketch. Helping you find the missing dimensions and giving you the option to label the missing dimensions.

You can define dimensions in one shot or if you would like to do them separately it gives you the option to dimension lines, circles, and arcs separately. Offering a right balance of speed boost and flexibility to the designer as it helps create fully-defined sketches.

The current feature offers dimensioning across a single geometry (such as length of a line or diameter of a circle). We are working on a smarter version that recommends dimensioning across multiple geometries (such as offset distance between two parallel lines). Stay tuned!

Centerline Recommendations

Sketch Helper now automatically recommends construction centerlines for circles and rectangles. This feature allows users to add construction centerlines for circles or rectangles to the sketch with a single click.

While making concentric circles is not difficult, creating concentric rectangles takes more effort. It takes multiple clicks just to find the center of a rectangle and imagine having to do that for multiple geometries. At Hestus, we are all about making engineers’ lives easier. A single click creation of centerlines allows you to simply align or center rectangles with respect to one another. It is also a great tool for creating patterns inside rectangular shapes.

New features and improvements

Degrees of Freedom (DOF) - Have you ever wondered why your sketch is not fully constrained? Or how many degrees of freedom (DOFs) are left in your sketch and where they are? You can now find out about remaining DOFs in your sketch as well as finding the points in the sketch that are not fully constrained. DOFs left in a sketch are shown in the top left corner of the Sketch Helper palette. Simply hover over that to see where the under constrained points are in your sketch. The DOF feature is currently in beta and may produce inaccurate results for some of the constraints (namely symmetry and offset). We’re actively improving it and welcome feedback to make it more reliable.

Smarter Recommendations – We've fine-tuned our recommendation engine to ensure that all suggestions are feasible and relevant, eliminating redundant or overconstraining recommendations. In the past, it sometimes made nonsensical suggestions, but we've fixed that to provide more accurate and useful results.

Up to 12× Speed Improvement – Optimized performance reduces compute load, making complex sketches run up to 12x faster.

Improved visualization of recommended actions – As correctly brought up by many of you, actions such as Perpendicular Arcs (Perp Arcs) or Concentric Circles/Arc (Concentric) were not properly highlighted. We have fixed that so you can easily and clearly notice the recommended actions.

In-App Tutorial

We've added a tutorial panel to the Solid Environment in Fusion to guide you through using Sketch Helper efficiently.

Introducing Hover to Highlight:

Our users spoke, and we listened. We've tackled your top concern: confusion over what’s being changed in complex sketches.

• Visual Clarity: Simply hover over any suggestion, and we'll highlight the elements we're planning to modify.
• Effortless Interaction: No need to click—just hover to see proposed changes.
• Seamless Application: Love the changes? Click the button to apply them instantly to your drawing.
• Peace of Mind: As always, you can easily undo any changes.

Experience the future of intuitive sketch editing with Hover to Highlight. Try it now and see the difference!

More Suggestions

• Dangling Points: We understand how annoying it can be when an area isn’t complete due to a misclick. That’s why we’ve introduced a feature to detect and suggest joining dangling points automatically. Misclicks are a thing of the past as we recommend joining dangling points.
• Constraint Conversion: Quickly convert perpendicularity constraints into horizontal and vertical ones for clearer, faster solutions. This also has the side bonus of faster constraint solves. Note: If you plan to rotate your part, we recommend sticking with perpendicular constraints.
• Simplified Arc Creation: We've streamlined the process of making perpendicular arcs where we will align the center of an arc to the adjoining edge.