HOOPS Communicator

Full Model Tree Access & Deep Model Interrogation

HOOPS Communicator understands engineering data, providing full access to CAD specific properties and attributes, including model structure information down to the individual faces, edges and points.

Exact Product Manufacturing Information (PMI)

Take advantage of extensive support for PMI for all major CAD formats, which faithfully reproduces the original PMI data attached to the model, including its semantic information.

Advanced Selection

HOOPS Communicator provides built-in selection support to interactively highlight and group entities within a CAD model such as parts, faces, edges and points. It allows for selection of single entities, 2D area and 3D volume, and is designed to ensure interactive selection performance even for the largest models. It also allows for highlighting of entities associated with a PMI element.

Precise Measurement Support

Leverage pre-built UI tools to measure lengths and distances within a CAD model, utilizing the original boundary representation (BREP) data if available to provide precise measurement results as well as physical property data.

Proximity / Ray Tests

Perform closest distance calculations between entities, shoot rays into the scene and determine entities within a given volume.

Cutting & Section Planes

HOOPS Communicator provides built-in interactive cutting plane support and automatically generates capping geometry for closed meshes. It also supports aggregating cutting planes into sectioning planes to slice through and cut-out parts of a model.

Support For Drawings

Native support for 2D DWG and DXF formats makes it easy to combine 2D and 3D models in the same view.

Point Cloud Support

Quickly access your point cloud data and combine point clouds with your 3D model. Visualize your point clouds in the highest quality with advanced techniques like eye-dome lighting and splat rendering.

Markup & Redlines

Pre-built operators provide support for model markup in 2D and 3D, and make it easy to serialize markup data on the server.

Intelligent Streaming

Interact with huge models in seconds, aggregate models from parts or subassemblies or access just a subset of the model thanks to our highly optimized streaming technology.

Ultra-Fast Rendering Pipeline

The viewer technology can maintain a consistent framerate for models made up of hundreds of thousands of components and millions of triangles, even on low-end hardware. Its rendering engine utilizes WebGL2 and WebAssembly for uncompromised performance on all modern desktop and mobile browsers.

Server-Side Rendering Option For Huge Data

Includes support for server-side rendering on remote GPUs to ensure fast and consistent viewing of even the largest models. The server-side rendering component uses the same API that is used by the client-side viewer, so transitioning between server and client-side rendering is seamless and no extra coding is required.

Shadows / Reflections / Ambient

Occlusion Visual effects like ground shadows, reflections and ambient occlusion which enhance the visual quality of the scene.

High Quality Hidden Line Rendering

High quality real-time hidden-line rendering.

Image And Vector Screenshot Support

Generate high quality screenshots as raster images or in the SVG vector format directly from the client or on the server.

Feature Rich, Granular API

The viewing client features a comprehensive JavaScript based API that provides low-level access to geometry as well as model structure information accompanied by a rich set of helper classes. Typescript Declaration Files are also available.

High Level “Operators”

Utilize our various high-level operators from advanced camera functionality like “walk” to selection, measurement and redlining either directly or leverage the provided source code to build your own custom functionality on top of it.

Prebuilt UI Components

We provide a full-featured CAD viewer with a comprehensive UI including full model tree support which can be easily extended or customized.

Expansive Example Code And Documentation

A comprehensive getting started guide, domain-specific application development tutorials, and dozens of code samples guide you through the development of your first prototype.

Flexible Deployment

Our streaming server as well as the CAD conversion utility are stand-alone executables available for Windows, Linux and Mac and can be easily integrated into your server infrastructure with prebuilt integration samples available for the most common frameworks. While streaming provides optimal performance, we also support a file-based mode that does not rely on any specialized server process. It’s up to you to pick the workflow that best fits your needs.

Easy Data Aggregation

For applications requiring the ability to aggregate data on the fly (like PLM applications and configurators) HOOPS Communicator offers the flexibility to utilize its streaming technology or fall back to a file-based aggregation that does not require a server component.

Geometry And Material Creation And Editing

Geometry as well as materials can be modified and created dynamically in the viewer, giving you the tools to integrate advanced business logic on the client or the server for many complex use-cases that go beyond simple viewing.

Several options are available for data import.

Data Import (Server Side)

We provide two options to get your data into HOOPS Communicator:

HOOPS Converter

This stand-alone multiplatform executable is meant to be deployed on a server and provides access to more than 30 CAD Formats (Upgrade to the HOOPS Web Platform to add HOOPS Converter), converting them to Stream Cache and other formats like Images and 3D PDFs. It also provides Product Structure Information through XML which makes it easy to associate your own business logic to the entities in a converted model. The HOOPS Converter functionality is also available as a library.

Direct Authoring

HOOPS Communicator includes a multi-platform C++ and Java library for creating Stream Cache models from scratch. The library includes helper functions that simplify the creation of complex CAD models based on your own data.

DATA LOADING (CLIENT-SIDE)

HOOPS Communicator utilizes its own proprietary file format called Stream Cache (SC). The SC format is optimized for streaming and model aggregation and handles the full breadth of engineering data beyond just triangles and graphics primitives. Your web application can access SC data in two different ways:

Streaming

To achieve optimal performance and responsiveness, HOOPS Communicator provides a server-side component called the HOOPS Stream Cache Server that facilitates fast, granular and intelligent streaming via a direct WebSocket connection to the HOOPS Web Viewer component running in the browser. This component also supports Server-Side Rendering where all rendering is performed on the server, and only images are sent to the client. We recommend using the HOOPS Stream Cache Server for the best loading performance, but it is not required to utilize HOOPS Communicator.

File-based loading

The Stream Cache file can also be directly read by the Web Viewer component via an HTTP request. In this case, a variant of the Stream Cache file called SCS is utilized.

Partner With THE Expert In Engineering Graphics

With over 25 years of expertise in engineering graphics, Tech Soft 3D is your partner during development of your application, serving as a highly responsive virtual extension to your engineering team.

Add HOOPS Exchange For CAD Import

HOOPS Exchange is the leading data translation technology with access to over 30 CAD file formats, making it easy to integrate robust CAD data translation into your application. 

A simple server application leverages the power of HOOPS Exchange to import CAD data from the most popular 3D file formats, convert to our stream-optimized web format, and export to web and CAD formats. Alternatively, you can bring in your own proprietary data with an easy-to-use authoring API.

Directly read CAD data from the most popular 3D file formats without any dependencies on proprietary CAD systems. Click here to view all supported file formats.

CAD specific metadata is retained and can be accessed on the client and the server, including:

• Assemblies and parts

• Trees of 3D entities (coordinate systems, wireframes, surfaces, and solids)

• Measurement-relevant curve and surface data

• Topological structures for surface and solid models

• Tessellated (triangulated) representation

• Markup data including Product and Manufacturing Information (PMI)

• Metadata such as name, color, layer and other non-geometric data

Upgrade to the HOOPS Web Platform to add HOOPS Exchange.

Add HOOPS Publish To Export 3D PDFs

An integration with HOOPS Publish allows developers to generate 3D PDF files, as well as self-contained HTML documents that can be opened in any web browser without an internet connection. Export to standard formats including JT, STEP, STL and XT, and create fully customizable image snapshots from any model. 

Upgrade to the HOOPS Web Platform to add HOOPS Publish.

Build Native Apps For Desktop, Mobile And AR/VR With HOOPS Visualize

Join hundreds of other engineering software companies and use the gold-standard HOOPS Visualize graphics engine to build desktop, mobile and AR/VR applications.

First Class Customer Support, Training And Consulting From HOOPS Experts

Our team of Consulting Engineers provide hands-on help throughout the initial development phase and our competent support team responds quickly to any issues or feature requests you might have.

Viewing

HOOPS Communicator provides a fully featured viewing and design review application out of the box that can be easily customized and branded, allowing you to integrate 3D graphics into your web application in a matter of days. With its extensive CAD format support, it provides immediate value in many viewing-oriented workflows.

BIM

HOOPS Communicator’s high-performance graphics engine enables viewing of large BIM models in seconds in the browser and allows for easy aggregation of federated BIM datasets. With its full support for structure and type data for IFC and Revit, it supports use-cases well beyond simple viewing and design review, providing a fully featured SDK to power any kind of application in the BIM lifecycle. The integration with HOOPS Exchange allows support for IFC and Revit models as well as 2D and 3D DWGs and DXFs.

Product Configurators

HOOPS Communicator fully supports dynamic model aggregation and client-side creation and editing of geometry with best-in-class performance, making it well suited for any type of dynamic configurator workflows from simple part catalogs to complex car configurators. Its advanced rendering features, including support for PBR materials and export capabilities to standard formats like STEP, are also important in this area. View the Product Configurator tutorial.

PLM Systems

HOOPS Communicator fully supports all relevant PLM workflows with a data-model that stores complex assemblies in a distributed fashion, allowing for quick on-demand aggregation of 3D data. A rich and fully customizable client-side viewer and support for more than 30 CAD formats makes HOOPS Communicator the ideal solution for adding graphics to any PLM application.

Flexible Enough To Support Many Other Verticals And Workflows

HOOPS Communicator includes a broad and general-purpose graphics SDK supporting many workflows in a wide variety of markets like FEA, 3D Printing, Design, eCommerce and many more.