Additive Manufacturing Software Developers Gain Competitive Advantage Using SDKs from Tech Soft 3D
Toolkits from Tech Soft 3D provide the necessary CAD data import, export, modeling and mesh healing components that allow companies to create leading 3D printing applications
BEND, Oregon — September 27, 2017 – Tech Soft 3D, leading provider of software development tools and 3D PDF solutions to the engineering software industry, today announced that many of their partners looking to add 3D printing capability to existing products or develop new innovative ones are using HOOPS software development toolkits and Polygonica in lieu of developing the technology in-house.
Software development toolkits from Tech Soft 3D provide world-class technology with key capabilities such as CAD translation, visualization, modeling, and mesh processing – capabilities that are incredibly difficult and costly to develop. By leveraging the Tech Soft 3D SDKs, additive manufacturing software developers get rock-solid functionality in their applications much more efficiently and cost effectively than developing it in-house.
“As 3D printing transitions from prototyping to commercial-grade production, it’s increasingly clear that robust software is a critical part of addressing real-world workflows,” said Ron Fritz, CEO of Tech Soft 3D. “We’re pleased to be providing so much of the core software that is helping drive the professionalization and innovation the market is seeing in 3D printing software.”
One of the hardest problems facing the additive manufacturing industry is how to get quality manufacturing data into their systems. STL files have traditionally been used but are extremely problematic and error prone. By directly reading both native and standard CAD file formats, products can increase their ease-of-use and ultimately their print quality. HOOPS Exchange is the powerhouse toolkit that does this for hundreds of engineering specific applications including many in the 3D printing market.
3D printing is starting to incorporate traditional engineering techniques into their workflows like using geometry dimensioning and tolerancing (GD&T), computational engineering analysis (CAE), and metrology for quality control. HOOPS Exchange excels at supporting these advanced workflows with data accessed from the original CAD files.
Even though direct access to CAD files is becoming more prevalent for 3D printing, there are still a tremendous number of existing STL files used and countless applications that depend on them. Tech Soft 3D has partnered with MachineWorks to offer Polygonica, the market-leading mesh healing toolkit, alongside HOOPS components. Polygonica has powerful mesh healing capabilities and many other mesh processing tools specific to 3D printing workflows. Adding Tech Soft 3D’s HOOPS graphics engines, HOOPS Visualize for desktop and mobile, or HOOPS Communicator for web visualization, make an extremely powerful platform for rapid product development.
According to a SmartTech market report, 3D Printing has a market size of $294 million and will grow over 150% in the next four years. This growth isn’t going to be all in traditional manufacturing industries like aerospace, automotive and consumer products. The same SmartTech report projects that by 2021 almost 30% of the additive manufacturing software market will come from application-specific tools, primarily from the dental and medical markets. These vertically focused software solutions require a high level of customization and provide great opportunity for new companies to emerge with specialized software.
Products from Tech Soft 3D for developing Additive Manufacturing software include:
- HOOPS Exchange: Read in 20+ Native CAD formats – Catia V4/5/6, NX, CREO, SOLIDWORKS, Solid Edge, Inventor, STL, STEP & IGES – used to provide fast, reliable CAD data access to engineering applications
- Polygonica from MachineWorks: Toolkit for mesh processing – quickly repair, simplify, offset and Boolean – everything needed to prepare meshes for 3D printing
- HOOPS Visualize & Communicator: High performance 3D graphic engines for desktop, mobile and web applications – visualize engineering data on any device, anywhere
- HOOPS Publish: 3D data publishing for native 3D PDF, 3MF & STL, HTML as well as standard CAD formats; allows for 3D print export, creating smart reports and archiving
- Siemens Parasolid Modeling Kernel: Convergent Modeling™ enables combining of meshes and boundary representation (BREP) to support advanced CAD/Additive Manufacturing workflows – being used to build Additive Manufacturing products of tomorrow
Sculpteo, and many other 3D print service bureaus, use HOOPS Exchange to quickly and accurately load 20+ different CAD file formats without the need for additional CAD software. HOOPS Exchange greatly increases ease-of-use and project success rates for their customers’ orders.
“STL files are not sufficient for manufacturing. Reading CAD files was necessary. Even if we don’t traditionally use 3rd party software, the best option was to license HOOPS Exchange. It was a fast integration, gave great performance and amazing results. With HOOPS Exchange we get access to the BREP which helps identify features, something we couldn’t get from STL. All of this is very important and contributes to a good user experience. Additionally, we can import dimension and tolerance information, which will be useful in the future.” - Clément Moreau, CEO
Renishaw chose Polygonica for its dental 3D Printing software. Key features used include mesh repair, Boolean operations, and simplification. Polygonica is growing in popularity for use in the highly specialized dental and medical markets.
"We chose Polygonica because its solid modeling and mesh healing capabilities are second to none.” - Bryan Austin, Director and General Manager, Renishaw Dental Products
About Tech Soft 3D
Tech Soft 3D is the leading global provider of development tools that help software teams deliver successful applications, as well as the creator of the 3D format that is part of the PDF standard. Established in 1996 and headquartered in Bend, Oregon, Tech Soft 3D also has offices in California, Ohio, France, England and Japan. The company’s toolkit products power nearly 500 unique applications running on hundreds of millions of computers worldwide, while the tetra4D brand of end-user products are used by many of the top manufacturing and construction firms for converting CAD data into 3D PDF. For more information, visit www.techsoft3d.com and www.tetra4d.com.
HOOPS is a registered trademark of Tech Soft 3D. All other products or company references are the property of their respective holders.