CADchat Leverages HOOPS Exchange for its CAD Data Translation Needs
CADchat & Tech Soft 3D
The Challenge
CADchat seeks to solve the disconnected project collaboration, design review, and communication experience faced by teams in different physical locations across many industries. This South Carolina-based company offers immersive digital workspaces that allow teams to more easily facilitate meetings, run design review sessions, and receive manufacturing feedback, to improve the entire design experience for its customers.
“Tech Soft 3D is the ideal partner, both from a strategic business perspective as well as from a business perspective."
Graham Bredemeyer, CADchat Co-founder and CEO
“CADchat is designed to unite, connect, and streamline the product development process for all stakeholders involved,” explained Dan Ward, Co-Founder and COO.
CADchat was born of the experiences and frustrations of its founders. “We looked at the entire design process and specifically the design review call and felt it’s entirely broken,” said Mr. Ward. “You’ve got different tools, you're sending files and screen grabs and engineering notes and things start to fall through the cracks.” Enter, CADchat.
In a more global, physically disconnected professional environment permanently altered by COVID-19, teams are looking for ways to improve their collaboration. While video conferencing tools are useful, CADchat provides a more complete cooperative experience. Mr. Ward said, “We see digital workspaces fitting and being an evolution of those communication tools, today and beyond.”
While there is plenty to distinguish CADchat from its competition, one notable highlight is the features in the multiplayer 3D models view. With this, users can see everyone present in the call’s cursors in the 3D environment, look through others' perspectives, or navigate the model by themselves. This is done without a classic screen-sharing experience or loss of resolution.
Co-founder and CEO Graham Bredemeyer summarized: “There is an upgrade in experience from features like the 3D experience, but also massive time and organizational savings from combining everything from your product development into one spot.”
With the need to translate 3D file formats confidently and securely, CADchat partnered with Tech Soft 3D to provide the reliability their customers expect.
To learn more about CADchat's Digital Workspaces, check out their explanation video here.
Comprehensive Data Transfer Between Formats Empowers Collaboration Across Multiple Parties
As part of their innovative approach to physical product design collaboration, CADchat needs to import and export a variety of formats, including their metadata, both quickly and reliably. For these capabilities, they partnered with Tech Soft 3D to license HOOPS Exchange.
Speaking to their unique needs, Mr. Bredemeyer explained that for their customers, “You have all these different parties not using the same CAD software. It’s a huge problem getting files back and forth between these people.” As the market leader in CAD data translation, HOOPS Exchange offers a seamless transfer of information from 30+ formats.
The CEO of CADchat said, “We are using HOOPS Exchange for unwrapping 3D models and translating them between file formats, which is hugely important for our product.”
One of the major benefits of this software development kit (SDK) is the support for valuable metadata that comes with many of these formats.
“We leverage the power that HOOPS Exchange has for reading data about the file,” Mr. Bredemeyer explained. “Particularly if it’s a 3D-model with B-REP data, we unpack additional metadata, things like volume measurements, bounding boxes, things of this nature.”
An especially powerful collaborative feature of CADchat is the ability to set permissions for different users to download data in a wide array of formats. As Mr. Bredemeyer explains, “We leverage HOOPS Exchange to translate those different formats for us.”
By using HOOPS Exchange, CADchat saved significant costs in both time and money for its development. “With the requirement to build all that infrastructure, our development time would have been increased dramatically,” said Mr. Bredemeyer.
Of course, some alternatives exist, but Tech Soft 3D proved to be the right fit for CADchat.
Speaking of the competition, Mr Bredemeyer clarified that, “They don't really have the reliability reputation that Tech Soft 3D brings.”
The CEO of CADchat summarized: “Tech Soft 3D is the ideal partner, both from a strategic business perspective as well as from a business perspective.” Tech Soft 3D is proud to be partnered with an exciting young company and looks forward to growing in our partnership together.
Industry:
Design Collaboration; Productivity
Challenge:
The company seeks to innovate physical product collaboration, communication
Needs to support import & export of a variety of CAD formats
Smaller company with limited development resources for format translation
Solution:
HOOPS Exchange provides the reliable import and export of a wide array of file formats, supporting the company in streamlining the collaboration process.
Results:
Created a fresh take on product design collaboration by providing 3D workspaces, data management, and cooperative tools that go beyond established video conferencing tools
Allowed the CADchat team to focus on their unique collaboration tool, rather than worry about file format data translation
Provides market-leading data translation reliability and speed to a company in an innovative collaboration space.