What can you do with nTop?
Your nTop Mindset
Where nTop Excels
- Compression of Design Timelines: Organizations using nTop report dramatic reductions in design cycle time.
- Complex Geometry Made Practical: nTop excels where traditional CAD struggles in crating cutting-edge complex geometries.
- Build reusable engineering components: Define custom blocks for recurring design elements—airfoils, fuselage sections, turbine blades, ducting—that capture domain knowledge and parameterization patterns. These components become building blocks for rapid concept generation across multiple programs.
- Integration with Modern Workflows: nTop notebooks integrate naturally with Optimization algorithms, AI and machine learning workflows, High-performance computing, and Automated manufacturing processes
Essential Concepts to Remember
- You’re building design spaces, not just shapes
- Everything is parametric and connected
- Fields are your new design primitive
- The notebook is your engineering knowledge repository
- Think in terms of logic and relationships, not just geometry
What This Means for Your Work
- Faster iteration through parametric flexibility
- More exploration of design possibilities
- Better optimization through systematic approaches
- Knowledge preservation that outlasts individual projects
- Integration readiness for AI and automation workflows
This helps you to use nTop anywhere you need conceptual design, iterative development, production optimization and you want to accelerate your engineering workflow.
Preparing for the Journey
You’ve now been introduced to nTop’s fundamental paradigm shift from traditional CAD. As you progress through this course, remember that learning nTop isn’t just about learning new tools, instead it’s about adopting a new way of thinking about design. You understand that:
- nTop captures design spaces as executable code, not individual designs
- Signed Distance Fields (SDFs) provide the mathematical foundation
- Field-based modeling enables unprecedented parametric flexibility
- Your role is to encode engineering knowledge into computational models
- This approach dramatically accelerates design iteration and exploration
Next Steps: In the following lessons, you’ll learn the practical skills to implement this philosophy, starting with nTop’s interface and basic modeling operations.