Our HOOPS Product Update highlights the biggest changes across the portfolio in 2025 and looks ahead to what’s coming in 2026. If you missed the live session, we’ve compiled the essentials below. You can also watch the recorded product update here.  

Key HOOPS Insights from 2025 

While innovation is crucial (and we have some fun new stuff to share), our core priority is always performance, quality, and incremental improvements to the toolkits you know and love. Supporting our Strategic Technology Partnerships is central to how we operate, and that is why we spent 61% of our development resources on performance and updates to our file formats, and graphics drivers . 

Engineering continues to shift towards a more continuous delivery schedule. This move helped us achieve the milestone record of nine product releases  in 2025. 

As much as we enjoy fixing bugs, preventing them in the first place is always the goal. Last year, we were able to reduce our reported bugs by 7%. When problems arise, we are getting to them faster than ever, with a 31% decrease in our average time to resolve partner issues in the last two years. 

Now, here is a product-specific breakdown of what changed in the last year and what is coming in 2026. 

HOOPS AI – The Newest Toolkit from Tech Soft 3D 

HOOPS AI was introduced in 2025 with the intent of unlocking the potential of 3D engineering data in modern machine learning workflows. The long-term vision is to capture the implicit knowledge engineers bring to CAD models and make it more accessible and actionable across teams. For a full breakdown of how we view our role in unlocking CAD for AI, click here. 

What Changed in 2025:

Last year, we launched a beta release, with over 30 companies testing the tool so far. The initial focus was on tooling and infrastructure, specifically: 

• Python-first Access: a Python wrapper on top of HOOPS Exchange to pull CAD structures into familiar ML tooling  

• Encoding / Dataset Preparation: transforms CAD representations into encodings that ML models can learn from  

• Pipeline tooling: parallel processing, storing intermediate steps for debugging/versioning, and repeatable experiments. 

• Sample ML architectures included: 

• Part classification 

• Manufacturing feature recognition 

What to Look For in 2026: 

We are releasing a Linux version as part of our official release on March 30^th, 2026. Tech Soft 3D is also looking to expand Python access to more HOOPS Exchange-backed data, with PMI being a specific target. 

In our Q&A section, we discussed how current examples are trained using public datasets, but there is a strong intent to support workflows trained on your own private data. 

HOOPS Exchange – The Leading CAD Access Toolkit 

Last year saw HOOPS Exchange continue to push beyond CAD data translation, serving as a truly comprehensive CAD data access solution. From full B-Rep and tessellation support to metadata and other PMI, along with downstream operations like projection and clash detection, HOOPS Exchange is the industry leader in data translation for a reason. 

What Changed in 2025 

We were excited to share our experimental USD writer, released in collaboration with NVIDIA. Related, Tech Soft 3D joined the OpenUSD Alliance. Our DGN reader hit general availability in the 2026.1.0 release (so not quite 2026, but close enough), supporting both V7 and V8 DGN files. We also saw a major project to improve tessellation quality, using cases such as simulation, additive manufacturing, and high-end visualization. 

In 2025, we focused on delivering key features requested by our partners. A few format-specific improvements include: 

• CATIA V5: extended ISO 14405 GD&T symbol support 

• Creo: 

• Assembly-level layers for Creo files 

• Support for family tables accelerator files to avoid regeneration work and speed up open times for instances and assemblies. 

• Support for simplified representations to load and display only what you need for large data. 

• glTF Reader: Draco compression supportRevit: 

• Connection point support 

• Improved metadata handling 

• Improved wireframe handling. 

• 3D XML: Import of markup-linked items. 

In terms of platform support, iOS and Catalyst now have full parity with macOS for natively supported readers/writers. 

What to Look For in 2026: 

The big themes of 2026 include higher-quality tessellation, official USD writing, a new ISO format (QIF), more configuration support, and improved loading performance. 

• Quad-Dominant Meshing (new tessellation algorithm) 

• First API already launching in 2026.1.0 

• Expect improvements throughout the year, with the goal of watertight, manifold meshes. 

• Full integration of the USD Writer, with improved capabilities  

• QIF 3.0 Reader for CAD and MBD Data: planned by the end of Q2 supporting industries requiring quality assurance like automotive, aerospace, and defense 

• Support for Arrangements in Siemens NX 

• Multiprocessing assembly import starting with CATIA V5 & NX 

HOOPS Visualize (Desktop & Web) 

First and foremost, in an effort to simplify our product portfolio, HOOPS Communicator was renamed HOOPS Visualize Web in 2025.  

What Happened with HOOPS Visualize Web 2025 

The past year was all about modernizing the UI, API, and delivery. A new UI, built on open-source components, was continuously developed throughout the year. The API was modularized, and key performance improvements were made. The toolkit saw frame rate improvements through draw call reduction and specific improvements for visualizing IFC relationships.  

What to Look For in 2026:  

In 2026, you can keep an eye out for custom shaders and WebGPU support. Other planned improvements include: 

• Per-object render modes 

• Changes to auto-orient PMI to keep it readable as the camera changes 

• Improved selection and manipulation of viewer-created markup and dimensions 

• Improved performance to reduce time-to-screen through compressed tessellation streaming 

What Happened with HOOPS Visualize Desktop 2025 

2025 saw a blend of new capabilities and partner requests fulfilled. These include 

• Volume Rendering, with sectioning and highlighting expected in Q1 2026 

• Text & animation toolkit 

• Edge Generation options kit, offering better control over adjacent edges, hard edges, and default visibility overrides. 

• Linux ARM & .NET 8 Support 

What to Look For in 2026:  

The big focus for 2026 is rebuilding parts of the graphics pipeline to support as much as 10x the data volume of previous versions while maintaining current features. 

HOOPS Envision, Solve, Access, and Mesh – The CAE Toolkits 

These four toolkits broadly serve CAE workflows, so we like to chat about them together.  

What Happened in 2025 For Our CAE Toolkits 

• In 2025, HOOPS Envision saw the release of Viz Streamer, a technology designed to help HOOPS Envision work with any data source, aimed at bringing legacy desktop CAE apps into the browser efficiently.  

• HOOPS Solve saw key performance improvements around beam sections, and a continued push to improve developer experience with better, clearer tutorials.  

• HOOPS Access now offers cyclic symmetry support for ANSYS and NASTRAN, with additional work on the VTK ecosystem supporting write results in VTU and initial support for VTP. The team also started some API simplification work, with the C++ effort designed to lay the foundation for a  Python interface. 

• HOOPS Mesh highlights include our work on conformal/coincident meshing workflows and more general extruded meshing improvements.  

What to Look For in 2026:  

The big updates for HOOPS Envision revolve around particle-based simulation visualization and server-side rendering improvements. Additionally, we are expanding HOOPS Envision’s support to cover the full range of CAE data accessible through HOOPS Access. 

An important 2026 initiative is strengthening the bridge between HOOPS Exchange, Polygonica, and HOOPS Mesh to create a cleaner workflow from CAD geometry import, through tessellation repair, and into meshing. 

We are looking at delivering HOOPS Solve, Access, and Mesh as a standard binary distribution, while continuing to provide obfuscated source for our partners who need it. HOOPS Access will support Ansys Fluent HDF5 format, and release two new API:  C++ and Python. 

Tech Soft 3D in 2026