AI 2D Drawing Creation in Siemens NX

AI 2D Drawing Creation in Siemens NX: Native Drawings, Built and Reviewed in Your Session

Most AI technical drawing tools hand back a picture, a PDF or a sheet from another CAD system. In a Siemens NX shop, useful AI 2D drawing creation looks different: a native NX drawing with views, sections, dimensions, fits and surface finish symbols on the model’s own edges, built in the session that is already open, checked by a second agent and released by an engineer.

This page is about the drafting layer itself: which drawing operations an AI can run in NX today, how it decides what goes on the sheet, how the sheet is checked, and what stays with the drafter. A designer asking for one drawing in a conversation is the job of our Drawing & Documentation Assistant; rule-based drawing generation over whole part families runs as NX workflow automation; templates, master model drawings and batch drafting are covered in our NX drawing automation whitepaper. All of them belong to our family of NX AI assistants and chatbots or build on the same tools.

AI 2D drawing creation in NX: the short version

• What it is: a catalog of typed NXOpen drafting tools that an AI agent calls in the live NX session. The agent decides what the drawing needs; NX builds and measures it.
• What it builds today: sheets in ISO sizes A4 to A0 or on your NX template; base, pictorial, projected, auxiliary and full section views; horizontal, vertical, diameter, radius, angular, perpendicular, parallel and chamfer dimensions; tolerances and ISO fits; surface finish symbols; notes and center marks.
• How it decides: from your drafting standard, which we derive from your existing NX drawings, plus an ISO method for parts that have never been drawn.
• How it is checked: a separate reviewer agent checks the finished sheet, reports overlaps and missing items, and the drafting agent fixes them before the engineer sees the result.
• What it is not: an image generator, a release without a human, or a replacement for the engineer’s judgement on datums, tolerances and inspection.

Why AI-generated engineering drawings have to be native NX drawings

A drawing that arrives as an image or a PDF looks finished and is a dead end. Nobody can update its views after a model change, its dimensions do not measure anything, and before release someone redraws it in NX anyway. The same applies to a sheet made in another CAD system and imported: the drawing objects do not belong to your NX part.

AI drawing creation inside NX avoids that at the source. The agent calls the same drafting builders an engineer reaches through the NX dialogs, so views hang on the model, dimensions are attached to its edges, and the values come from NX’s own measurement. A diameter on the sheet is the diameter of the cylinder, not a number the AI believed. What comes out is a drawing an engineer can open, edit, update and release like any other.

NX itself does not offer an AI command for this. The AI features Siemens lists for the December 2025 Designcenter NX release are the Copilot, the selection of similar faces and edges, and the prediction of PMI annotation planes; none of them chooses a drawing’s views or dimensions. Siemens’ AI automatic drawings, which generate up to 80 percent of 2D drawing views, shipped in Solid Edge 2026, not in NX. In NX, the route to AI-generated drawings is NXOpen.

What the AI can put on an NX drawing today

The catalog grows project by project. These are the drafting tools in our current NX build, with their status stated plainly: run in a live NX session, or proven in batch tests and not yet used live.

Not in the catalog yet: detail and broken views, half and stepped sections, hole callouts and centerlines on the drawing, balloons, parts lists and assembly drawings. They follow the same recipe, and we build them when a project needs them. Our latest live reference run: on 1 October 2026 the agent drew a turned part it had never seen, without a dimension plan. The sheet has a main view, a section and a pictorial view; about 23 dimensions (diameters, lengths, chamfers and radii) with fits and tolerances; three surface finish symbols plus the collective mark; and a bilingual note with a leader. From request to reviewed sheet, the run took about eight and a half minutes, including two review rounds. It was a plain sheet without a company frame or title block, which is what a template adds.

How the AI decides what goes on the drawing

The hard part of an AI-made drawing is not the drafting command but the choice behind it: which views, which sections and which dimensions this part needs. A sheet that looks plausible but follows nobody’s standard fails at the first checker. Our agent takes those decisions from three sources, in this order.

1. Your drafting standard, read from your drawings. Batch NXOpen scripts read a set of your existing NX drawings with their models: sheets, views, sections, dimension types, tolerances, GD&T and surface finish symbols. From that we derive your house rules, such as sheet format and scale, which dimensions go in which view, row spacing, general tolerances and how your team writes fits and roughness. In a customer project this ran over the customer’s existing drawing set; the rules are yours and stay yours.
2. A dimension plan for parts that already have a drawing. When a part is redrawn, for example on a new template or after remodeling, the existing drawing gives a plan with every dimension and its anchor on the model. The agent rebuilds it and we compare the result with the original.
3. An ISO method for new parts. For a part that has never been drawn, the agent follows a written method based on ISO 128-3 for views and sections, ISO 129-1 for dimensioning, ISO 286 for fits and ISO 22081 for general tolerances, combined with your house rules. It is instructed to mark every tolerance or datum it had to assume, so the engineer sees what to confirm.

Two rules hold for every drafting tool. The AI never places a dimension at a guessed coordinate: it names the edges, center marks or model points to measure, NX measures them, and the tool places the dimension in a row on a chosen side of the view. And the scale, the views and the dimension set are the agent’s proposal, not its decision: the drawing is released by the engineer.

How an AI drawing request runs in NX

Take the reference run from above: a turned part that had never been drawn, to be shown in a main view, a section and a pictorial view. Whether the request comes from a chat panel or from a larger agent task, the drafting follows the same pattern.

1. Read the part. The agent lists the bodies, faces and features it needs and finds the edges and points it will measure.
2. State the plan. Sheet format, views, the section and the dimension set, following your house rules, or the ISO method if the part has never been drawn.
3. Create the sheet and views. On your template, base view first; projected, auxiliary and section views are placed next to their parent view, with a warning if one leaves the sheet.
4. Dimension and annotate. Dimensions in rows on the chosen side of each view, fits and tolerances, surface finish symbols, notes and center marks. Every value is measured by NX on the edges and points the agent picked.
5. Review. The reviewer agent checks the sheet, and the drafting agent moves or deletes what it flags.
6. Hand over. The engineer receives the drawing with a short report of what was built and which values were assumed, checks it and releases it, or changes what needs changing.

Single drawings requested from a panel are what our NX drawing assistant does; how AI tools reach NX at all is explained on our Siemens NX MCP server page.

A second agent checks every sheet

An AI that draws needs a checker that did not draw. Ours is a separate reviewer agent that checks the finished sheet and reports what needs fixing.

An honest note on what the reviewer is. It is an AI, not a deterministic rule checker, and we have not measured its hit rate yet; that is part of a pilot. Where you need rule-based drawing checks, NX’s own Check-Mate offers drafting tests such as overlapped member views, views within the sheet, up-to-date drafting and dimensions with manual text, and both layers can run on the same drawing.

AI drawing creation vs NX’s built-in drafting commands

NX already removes many clicks from drafting. What it does not do is decide what a drawing needs. That is the gap the AI fills, and the native commands stay useful next to it.

Why choosing dimensions is the hard part, and which dimension classes can be automated today, is the subject of our status report on NX automatic dimensioning. If you are still deciding whether a part needs a drawing at all, read MBD vs 2D drawing in NX; for annotations on the 3D model instead of the sheet, see NX MBD with AI.

AI 2D drawing creation and its neighbors on this site

Several of our pages are about drawings and AI in NX. They describe different jobs, and most drawing portfolios need more than one of them.

What AI drawing creation does not do yet

The tools make an AI quick at drafting work you can describe. They do not make it the person who signs the drawing. These are the limits we state in the first meeting.

Two further notes. Today the agent draws on a sheet in the part file itself; a master model drawing, a separate drawing part that references the model as many Teamcenter setups require, is set up as a project step. And where your parts come in families that one rule set can describe, rule-based NX workflow automation is cheaper per sheet and fully testable; AI drafting is for the parts those rules never fit.

Control: undo, rollback and the engineer’s release

An AI that writes on a manufacturing drawing has to be easier to correct than a colleague, not harder.

• Every change is one undo step. Each drafting tool sets its own undo mark in NX, so a wrong view or dimension is one entry in the undo list.
• Failed calls roll back. If NX rejects a dimension or a view, the tool undoes its own partial work and reports the NX error instead of leaving half-built objects on the sheet.
• Assumptions are marked. The agent is instructed to list the tolerances and datums it had to assume in its report, so the engineer knows what to confirm.
• Nothing hidden. Every tool call is shown with its arguments, result and runtime, and every model request is logged.
• Confirmation where you want it. In our demo setup the drafting tools run directly, because every step is one undo. If chosen steps should wait for the engineer’s OK, we build that confirmation step in the project.
• Release stays human. A drawing carries liability. The agent prepares it; your engineer checks, signs and releases it in your usual workflow.

Deployment, data and hosting options

The drafting tools run in the live NX session. NX is busy only while a tool executes. Our current drafting tools are built and tested on NX 2606.

Part files and drawings stay where they are. What reaches a model is your request, your house rules and what a tool returns: feature and geometry descriptions, the dimension list and, for the reviewer, an image of the sheet. Your house rules are files in your project, not training data. Where the models run is decided per project: Claude models are available directly from Anthropic and through cloud providers with EU regions, and models hosted in Germany or on premises can be connected to the same tool layer as part of a project. The background is in our guide to sovereign agentic AI in European manufacturing.

How we build AI drawing creation for your NX

Most of the effort is not in the AI. It is in your standard: which drawings your team makes, on which templates, and which rules a checker applies to them. That comes first.

1. Workshop. Which drawings cost your team the most time, on which templates and to which standard; the result is one part class to start with.
2. Read your drawings. Batch scripts read a representative set of your existing NX drawings, and we write down your house rules with your drafting lead.
3. Template. Your NX drawing template and its title block links are connected, so the agent drafts on the sheet your checkers expect.
4. Reference test. The agent redraws existing drawings of yours from their dimension plan, and we compare dimension by dimension. In our own headless rebuilds from anchor points, one part came out 10 of 10 identical and another 8 of 10, with two dimensions off by 0.27 mm and 0.015 mm.
5. Pilot. New parts of the chosen class, drawn by the agent and released by your engineers, measured on time to release and on the corrections they make.
6. Rollout. More part classes, more view types and more users, with the same tools serving chat panels, buttons and agents.

Start with one drawing type in your NX

We do not start with every drawing in your vault. We start with one part class your team draws often, a handful of its existing drawings and your template.