Current release
Version: 0.6.3
Release date: May 13, 2025
We're thrilled to introduce two of our most requested features: Mirror and Quad Mirror recommendations. These enhancements aim to streamline your design process, making sketching faster and more intuitive. Plus, we've revamped our UI for a more intuitive experience.
As always we’d like to learn from you about your experience of using Sketch Helper as well as your daily challenges designing in CAD. You may reach us out at support@hestus.co.
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.
Version: 0.6.3
Release date: May 13, 2025
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Previous versions
Version: 0.5.0
Release date: Apr 07, 2025
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Version: 0.5.0
Release date: Apr 07, 2025
We are back with another update to Sketch Helper. We just finished some features that we loved internally, and wanted to get it out to our users as quickly as possible.
This release includes two main features, Auto Dimensioning and Centerline Recommendations. Both of which are based on the feedback we received from our users.
As always, we’d love hearing from you about your experience of using Sketch Helper. As well as challenges you face on a daily basis working with the CAD software. You may reach us out at support@hestus.co.
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.
Version: 0.5.0
Release date: Apr 07, 2025
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Version: 0.4.1
Release date: Mar 31, 2025
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Version: 0.4.1
Release date: Mar 31, 2025
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.
Easier Installation & Updates
Now Available on the Autodesk App Store – Download Sketch Helper directly from Hestus Page on Autodesk App Store for seamless integration.
Executable Versions – Straightforward installation via `.msi` (Windows) or `.pkg` (macOS). No more manually unzipping a package and moving it to a specific folder.
Automatic Updates – Once installed, no more manual downloads are needed! The auto-installer notifies you of new versions and handles updates automatically.
In-App Tutorial
We've added a tutorial panel to the Solid Environment in Fusion to guide you through using Sketch Helper efficiently.
