Tech Soft 3D Unveils HOOPS AI

Tech Soft 3D has released HOOPS AI, a framework built to unlock artificial intelligence and machine learning for CAD data, after a beta program involving 30-plus companies.

HOOPS AI has reached general availability, ready to support engineers working in product lifecycle management, manufacturing execution software, computer-aided manufacturing, manufacturing, and any other team with complex 3D datasets looking to integrate 3D engineering data into machine learning pipelines.

HOOPS AI provides framework to build machine learning models specifically with CAD data.

“The official launch of HOOPS AI marks an important step in Tech Soft 3D leading the effort to bring AI to engineering data,” says Gavin Bridgeman, chief technology officer, Tech Soft 3D. “For the first time, developers have a framework designed specifically to make CAD data usable in modern machine learning workflows.”

First introduced in late 2025 as a technology preview, HOOPS AI supports data preparation and model experimentation, allowing teams to run hundreds or thousands of models simultaneously. This rapid iteration allows for a smaller team to cut development cycles from months to weeks, the company says The capabilities teams can create include automated part classification and metadata enrichment, manufacturing feature detection, similarity search and duplicate detection, design reuse and optimization, and more.

New Features 

New since its limited release, HOOPS AI includes support for Windows and Linux, the latter being important for AI and data-processing pipelines. This release introduces CAD embeddings, which capture the semantic meaning and relationships within complex CAD data, allowing machine learning modules to identify similar parts and understand relevant design context. The tool automatically defines those relationships without explicit human input, based on patterns identified through its analysis.

Also, HOOPS AI supports every aspect of the machine learning lifecycle, from CAD access, dataset preparation, optimized encoding, visualization, scaling tools, and much more. Data scientists and developers can leverage this toolkit to build automated, intelligent experimentation systems that run hundreds or thousands of model variations, track results, and improve continuously. 

HOOPS AI enables developers to apply machine learning to CAD data for tasks like part classification, manufacturing feature detection, and similarity search across large design libraries.

The long-term vision of the product aims to capture the expert engineering knowledge in CAD models and unlock it across teams. While current examples of HOOPS AI in action are trained on public datasets, the goal is for organizations to train using their own private data.

About Tech Soft 3D

Tech Soft 3D provides engineering software development toolkits and industrial applications for CAD & CAE data conversion, visualization, and simulation. The company was established in 1996 and is headquartered in Bend, OR, while having other offices in the USA, France, England, Japan, Germany, and Norway. 

Sources: Press materials received from the company and additional information gleaned from the company’s website.