HOOPS Visualize

• High-performance, engineering-centric visualization which uses highly optimized OpenGL or DirectX drivers to take full advantage of available graphics hardware

• Thread-safe C++ and C# interfaces, which internally utilize multi-threading

• GUI-independent event handling to facilitate code portability across common GUI frameworks such as MFC, WPF, QT, and Cocoa

The cornerstone of HOOPS Visualize is the graphics kernel, a full-featured, engineering-focused scene-graph technology that we call Core Graphics. Core Graphics is integrated into a framework that provides many of the standard capabilities found in engineering applications.

High Performance

HOOPS Visualize offers optimal graphics performance on all supported desktop, mobile, AR and VR platforms and devices. By utilizing automatic scene optimization techniques and advanced culling it ensures a highly interactive framerate for even the most complex models.

High Quality

HOOPS Visualize takes advantage of modern graphics hardware, with advanced shadowing techniques, ambient occlusion, reflections, fast and accurate multi-layer transparency, fast hidden line and other rendering features. It also supports Physically Based Rendering (PBR) materials for even more realism.

Learn more about HOOPS Visualize in the Technical Overview.

HOOPS Visualize is more than just a graphics engine, it is a framework for building engineering applications with an engineering focused scene-graph technology at its core. Wrapped around this graphics core is a customizable and extendable class layer that encapsulates a lot of high-level functionality found within engineering applications and offers integrations with other components like solid modelers.

HOOPS Visualize utilizes “Sprockets”, hooks into the event loop of the application and provides many of the standard operators used in engineering software applications. The operators in Sprockets range from simple camera operators to advanced measurement and redline operators. The APIs to these operators are designed to give developers full flexibility to customize them to meet their needs.

The Sprockets layer also includes integrations of a variety of complementary components that are widely used within engineering software applications. Through these integrations, developers can easily load and interact with a wide variety of CAD data. The HOOPS Exchange integration allows developers to easily import a wide variety of CAD formats. Once the data is imported, developers can take advantage of high-level APIs to do common tasks like isolate/hide/show parts in an assembly and iterate through views in the model. Integrations with Autodesk's RealDWG toolkit and Trimble's SketchUp SDK are also provided.

The Sprockets layer also provides an integration of the Parasolid modeling kernel. This integration allows developers to quickly leverage the power of Parasolid in a working application.

Finally, HOOPS Visualize comes with several sample sandbox applications that demonstrate HOOPS Visualize working with the different GUI toolkits. Sandbox applications are provided for each of our supported GUI toolkit integrations and provide a good starting point for developing your application.

Built-In Measurement & Markup

HOOPS Visualize has many pre-built operators to measure lengths, distances, and angles within a CAD model, utilizing the original boundary representation (BREP) data if available to provide precise results. Another set of operators provides rich support for model markup in 2D and 3D.

Rich Line & Text Support

HOOPS Visualize offers best-in-class support for line rendering with a rich selection of custom line styles, full control of line thickness, multi-line support, infinite lines and many other features required for professional engineering applications. It also supports fast and high-quality rendering of 2D and 3D text with full internationalization support, extensive support for system and TrueType fonts, granular per character attributes and styles, predefined Geometric Dimensioning and Tolerancing (GD&T) fonts and much more.

2D Support

HOOPS Visualize handles 3D models and 2D drawings equally well, utilizing its advanced line and text rendering as well as its support for clip regions and other features to accurately display even the most complex drawings.

Built-In Printing Support

HOOPS Visualize includes dedicated support for printers and plotters offering fast, high quality and high-resolution printing for PDF, Postscript and Graphics Device Interface (GDI) devices utilizing a sophisticated hybrid vector/raster hardcopy approach.

Advanced Selection & Highlighting

HOOPS Visualize has highly customizable support for selection and highlighting with many advanced techniques to quickly highlight entities within its scene graph and precise analytic and image-based picking of entities or sub-entities such as lines, faces and points.

Massive Point Cloud Support

HOOPS Visualize provides a range of interactive navigation and analysis tools specifically aimed at working with point clouds and laser scan data with features like eye-dome lighting and splat rendering offering best-in-class visualization of point cloud data. Utilizing dynamic level of detail combined with an optimal out-of-core approach HOOPS Visualize can render point clouds with billions of points interactively.

Learn about more features in the Technical Overview.

HOOPS Visualize supports all major native platforms including desktop operating systems:

• Windows

• Linux

• Mac

As well as mobile platforms:

• iOS

• Android

And supports AR and VR development:

• ARKit

• ARCore

• OpenVR

• HoloLens SDK

HOOPS Visualize provides all the technology you need to build best-in-class AR and VR applications, offering integration with all major AR and VR SDKs and platforms, and high-performance engineering focused visualization.

Its thread-safe interface is available in C++ as well as C# with sample integrations to GUI frameworks like WPF, MFC, QT and Cocoa.

HOOPS Visualize supports many, many more features like section planes with capping edges and faces, various color interpolation techniques suitable for CFD and FEA including isolines and contour lines, advanced hidden line rendering, polygonal clip regions, multi-window and overlay rendering. For a more comprehensive list please see the HOOPS Visualize Technical Overview.

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. 

Through its full integration with HOOPS Exchange, your application can 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:

• 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 Native 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 Native Platform to add HOOPS Publish.

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.

Additive Manufacturing

HOOPS Visualize accelerates the development of modern additive manufacturing software with its flexible visualization as well as a partnership with Polygonica which provides advanced mesh processing capabilities including auto-healing, simplification, lattice generation and other features.

Building & Construction

HOOPS Visualize allows developers to build world-class AEC and BIM applications powering large model visualization on desktop, mobile and for AR and VR platforms.

Viewing, Technical Illustrations & Digital Mockup

HOOPS Visualize is perfectly suited for any downstream use of 3D data, allowing you to extract all engineering data within a CAD model including PMI and feature tree information with HOOPS Exchange, while providing best-in-class, high performance visualization capabilities.

CAD

HOOPS Visualize is perfectly suited for any type of CAD and data authoring application, providing a feature rich and battle tested framework for your development team with best-in-class visualization, and a tight integration with Siemens Parasolid for any type of modeling workflows.

CAM

HOOPS Visualize is perfectly suited for Computer-Aided Manufacturing (CAM) applications, unlocking access to all engineering data within a CAD model including exact surfaces (BREP), accurate product manufacturing information (PMI) and the CAD feature tree when used with HOOPS Exchange. Its engineering focused, high performance visualization makes it easy to visualize toolpaths, cutting planes and annotations and makes it easy to perform measurements on the native CAD geometry.

AR/VR

HOOPS Visualize provides all the technology you need to build best-in-class AR and VR applications, offering integration with all major AR and VR SDKs and platforms, and high-performance engineering focused visualization.