3 Ways Your CAD Data Is More Valuable Than You Thought

Engineers know exactly how much is packed into a CAD file. Far beyond the geometry itself, modern engineering formats can support everything from materials and manufacturing instructions to information vital for inspection, sales, and maintenance. As engineering data becomes a strategic asset throughout the organization, 3D application developers should look to create products that prioritize data access and integrity.

Unfortunately, too many applications are built around loading only the CAD geometry, losing all the other information in the process. Without meaningful access to the full CAD file throughout the product lifecycle, companies are losing out on the true potential of their CAD data.

During our recent webinar with VNTANA on Getting the Most Out of Your CAD Data, we discussed three areas where closing that gap creates real value: better utilization of the full CAD file, leveraging engineering data to train AI, and making use of CAD data after a part is manufactured.

Your CAD File Holds Far More Data Than Many Applications Extract

Most modern CAD files support assembly structure, configurations and family tables, assembly-level PMI, GD&T in its various forms, material information, feature information, and persistent IDs that track a part through engineering changes. While some of this data exists, many data import solutions bring in the 3D shape and little else, regardless of whether the parent application captured more information.

For engineering applications to get the most out of CAD data, developers and their eventual end-users need to be able to access the full, data-rich content of their industry formats.

"That's really important when you talk about a commercial SDK. You want to feel confident that no matter what your users throw at your application, you can support the breadth of that data coming in, as well as the depth. That's what lets you make engineering decisions on rich data and use it in a meaningful way."

— Jonathan Girroir, Senior Director, Toolkit Marketing, Tech Soft 3D

HOOPS Exchange, the leading CAD data access library, continues to support rich engineering data. Notable recent additions include:

• Creo Embedded Components Support

• Support for STEP AP242 v3, a format built specifically to carry intelligent PMI and GD&T rather than geometry alone.

• ISO GD&T support for CATIA V5

• IFC 4.3 for AEC workflows

• Bentley MicroStation DGN

• glTF Draco compression

The increased support in these areas is intended to help meet the growing demands for interoperability between mechanical CAD and AEC while preserving that full scope of CAD data that is essential to modern engineering workflows.

New formats are seeing rising adoption, and new demands for data integrity along with it. Universal Scene Description (USD), with its composable architecture, started at Pixar as a format for scene interoperability and has since pulled in Adobe, Apple, Autodesk, and NVIDIA. BREP became part of USD's official schema earlier this year, and NVIDIA is pushing the format as a primary path into Omniverse, which matters directly for robotics simulation and synthetic training data. USD as a format is adapting to industry demands for it to offer more than a visual shell.

Despite these improvements, it's important to be aware of the current limitations of CAD data transfer. For example, kinematic data, whether two parts are rigidly locked or can pivot around a point, is only extractable where the source CAD system authored it in the first place, and support varies by format. Gaps in capability like this serve to highlight that depth in CAD data access require format-by-format engineering instead of a single, generic parser.

Modern CAD Can Train Models, Not Just Render Them

Perhaps one of the most exciting opportunities for modern engineering applications is the value their models can provide outside of visualization.

Once assembly structure, topology, and geometry are available in a structured form, that same data can be encoded into tensors and used to train machine learning models directly on the 3D shape, evaluating face size, face adjacency, and how surfaces relate to each other, rather than learning from a 2D image of a part.

This technology can enable features like AI part similarity search, allowing a manufacturer to find parts with known tolerances, verified costs, or existing meshing parameters and apply that history to a new part instead of starting from nothing. Part classification can help organize large CAD libraries that would otherwise depend on manual labeling. Feature detection can accelerate quoting, manufacturing, and inspection workflows. One of Tech Soft 3D's manufacturing partners is applying the same approach to CNC process planning, using geometry to infer how a part should be produced.

Teams are extending similarity search toward automatic material assignment, using AI inference or an existing material database.

Tech Soft 3D's newest toolkit, HOOPS AI, allows you to streamline the use of your own CAD data to train models. The toolkit allows you to prep and transform CAD data at scale, helping to navigate the inherent complexity of engineering data to run experiments and deploy AI models without building your own CAD processing pipeline from scratch.

HOOPS AI is being used to create trained models that understand 3d shapes so engineering knowledge can be reused. Through it’s part similarity search algorithms, costing, sourcing, manufacturing, and additional business information can be attached to CAD models and used to infer similar information about new designs, cutting design time and overall project cost.

Your CAD Data Doesn't Stop Mattering Once the Part Gets Made

While CAD is inherently useful in the design and production of a product, there is increasing attention on the role this data can play after physical assembly of a component. One example of this is in helping verify that what got built matches the intended design.

When parts are manufactured, there is usually a process of inspection to make sure it was manufactured to the original specifications.  This process has historically been handled inconsistently, with no shared standard for describing how a part should actually be measured.

Take a part with a mirrored left and right half. While the reflection plane is a real design element and a natural reference point for a tolerance like parallelism, that plane doesn't physically exist on the final, manufactured part. There is nothing for a probe to touch or measure. Traditional processes of outlining inspection requirements may fail to catch this distinction, creating a tolerance defined by something that cannot be measured on a CMM (Coordinate Measurement Machine).

This is where the file format QIF, the Quality Information Framework, offers its utility. QIF provides a single structured way to define inspection paths, including not just what needs to be checked, but how to go about measuring it and a way to record the outcome. The format requires inspection instructions to be defined only in terms of what's physically measurable, not just what's geometrically convenient to reference in the design.

By supporting QIF as a format, developers can ensure their applications are meeting a growing demand for data that serves engineering workflows at the tail end of the product lifecycle.

HOOPS Exchange is starting to close that same loop from the CAD data access side. As of the 2026.6.0 release, it includes a beta QIF 3.0 reader, a first step toward carrying that same PMI and GD&T fidelity through to the inspection stage, not just design and manufacturing. As a beta, it's still limited in scope, with more features supported in the upcoming general availability release.

Reliable Access Unlocks CAD Data

All three of these insights share a common trait: reliable access to the full depth of information in CAD data opens doors for users to get ahead. As developers, providing that access in your applications is essential to maintaining a competitive advantage in your field.

Over the decades, Tech Soft 3D has seen more CAD data than any other toolkit provider, with HOOPS Exchange a key part of why it sits underneath tools like Unity, Unreal, and Omniverse's importers, along with many more.

To learn more about HOOPS Exchange, HOOPS AI, or to ask any other questions you might have, contact us.

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