HOOPS 3DF 31.20
Overview
TechSoft 3D is pleased to announce the release of HOOPS 3DF version 31.20. This update introduces native support for new industry-standard formats, delivers massive performance gains for point cloud workflows, and provides developers with more intelligent tools for managing complex 3D annotations.
What’s New in 31.20
Next-Generation Point Cloud Support
The toolkit’s point cloud capabilities have been significantly expanded with the introduction of native support for the e57 file format. Advanced users can now read and write location, color, and intensity data directly within the Out-of-Core (OOC) workflow. Single scan data is supported in this release and multiscan processing will come in a future release.
Intelligent Text & Annotation Management
Maintaining visual clarity in complex scenes is now more automated. A new depth-sorting feature has been introduced that automatically organizes segments by their effective Z-depth. This ensures that labels and annotations naturally follow the model and maintain correct visual priority without overlapping during zoom operations. Rendering logic has also been refined to ensure that text with background masks remains perfectly legible and that annotations display correctly even when anti-aliasing is disabled.
Enterprise Security and Core Stability
This release delivers a significantly hardened security profile and resolves deep-seated stability issues that were blocking long-term support upgrades for key partners.
Hardened 3DF Stream Interpretation: To eliminate potential buffer overflow vulnerabilities, insecure string and buffer operations were replaced with secured, bounded functions throughout the HSF file-reading path.
Critical Security Library Upgrades: libtiff 4.7.2 was integrated to resolve multiple high-severity vulnerabilities (including CVE-2026-4775), ensuring compliance with modern security audits.
Restored Linux Cluster Compatibility: By removing an undesired direct dependency on libOpenGL.so, support was restored for GPU-less and null-driver Linux clusters, a critical requirement for large-scale simulation environments.
Virtualized Environment Stability: VRAM resource management for point sprites was optimized, eliminating high-priority crashes specifically encountered when running Visualize in virtualized (VM) environments.
High-Performance Data and Geometry Handling
Significant optimizations were made to the core processing engines to handle massive datasets and complex geometric operations more efficiently.
Accelerated OOC Ingestion: The OOC preprocessor now features optimized string parsing and conversion algorithms, resulting in drastically faster ingestion times for large point cloud datasets.
Fluid Interaction with Cut Geometry: Transformations applied to cut geometry were optimized, ensuring that translating large models with active cutting planes remains fluid and responsive.
Robust Large Texture Support: New size-handling logic in the OpenGL2 driver prevents crashes when loading and converting extremely high-resolution textures.
Interaction and Platform Refinements
These updates focus on the reliability of the user interface and the precision of visual interactions across desktop, web, and manufacturing platforms.
QIF Data Support for Digital Manufacturing: Support for the Quality Information Framework (QIF) format was added, enabling the reading, loading, and graphical display of QIF data within Visualize 3DF and the 3DPartViewer to support digital inspection applications.
Reliable WPF Application Recovery: A new buffer recovery mechanism ensures that WPF-based applications recover instantly from system sleep or screen locks, eliminating intermittent white-screen and crash issues.
Deterministic Rendering for Complex Text: By implementing an ordered mapping system, issues where text would fail to display correctly when anti-aliasing was disabled were resolved.
Visualize Web Integration: The release includes an upgrade to Visualize Web (HVW) 2026.6.0, bringing the latest quality enhancements for HTML output workflows to 3DF.
Technology Update
Platform Changes
- Upcoming Change Affecting All Platforms: Beginning with HOOPS Visualize 3DF 32.00, planned for release in February 2027, Tech Soft 3D will require C++17 as the minimum supported C++ language standard for building and developing HOOPS Visualize. This change affects customers who compile Visualize-related source code, including source code provided with Visualize distributions such as MVO modules, 3DPartViewer, sample applications, and sandbox applications.
- The minimum supported Linux platform configuration for both x86_64 and ARM is now glibc 2.28 and gcc toolset 10 (10.3.1), equivalent to Red Hat Enterprise 8.10.
- See the platform deprecation announcement under the Deprecations section.
Third-Party Library Updates
| Library | New Version |
|---|---|
| libtiff | 4.7.2 |
Library Compatibility Information
| Library Name | Version | Windows | Linux | OS X | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| DGN Direct | 4.2 |  |
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| HOOPS Communicator | 2026.6.0 | |
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HTML HIO only works with Visual Studio v142. |
| HOOPS Exchange | 2026.6.0 | |
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| HOOPS Luminate | 2026.1.0 | |
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| .NET Framework | 4.8 | |
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Required for VS 2019 libraries and samples. |
| .NET Standard | 2.0 | |
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Required for VS 2019 and 2022 libraries. |
| .NET Core | 8.0 | |
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Required for VS 2022 samples. |
| Parasolid | 35.1 | |
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| Qt | 6.5.3 | |
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| Qt | 5.12.7 | |
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Visualize is compatible with Qt 5.4 only on OSX |
| RealDWG | 2023 | |
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RealDWG 2023 is only compatible with Visual Studio 2019 (v142 toolchain) |
| RealDWG | 2025 | |
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RealDWG 2025 is only compatible with Visual Studio 2022 (v143 toolchain) |
| SketchUp | 2023 | |
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64-bit Windows only. Requires Visual Studio 2019 Redistributable. |
New Features
- HC_Set_Window_By_Point: A new function that defines a window’s position based on a 3D object point, enabling automatic depth-based sorting.
- Native support for reading single scan e57 file formatted location, color, and intensity data directly within the Out-of-Core (OOC) workflow.
API Changes
- Enhanced Window Options: New options for HC_Set_Window_With_Options, including “position = object point” and “subwindow sorting”, allow for more intelligent management of overlapping annotations.
Deprecations
- Platform Deprecation Announcement: Support for Visual Studio 2019 (toolchain 14.2) and .Net 8 will be discontinued in 3DF 32.00. Continued support for this platform will only be available in the 3DF LTS release stream beyond December 2026.
- Platform Deprecation Announcement: Support for MacOS on Intel architecture will be discontinued starting with 3DF 32.00 and 30.80-LTS due to the end of support in MacOS 27. Developers are encouraged to migrate to newer toolchains and ARM-based Apple Silicon to ensure continued compatibility and performance.
- As part of efforts to resolve and reduce the risk of introducing CVEs the use of ImageMagick and related utilities are deprecated and will be removed over the coming two releases.
Fixed Bugs
| Issue | Description |
|---|---|
| SDHV-21622 | Prevent point sprite to use VRAM if resources are not sufficient in GeoDL |
| SDHV-21609 | Guard against depth peeling when doing selection |
| SDHV-21582 | The Opengl library now loads correctly on GPU-less/null-driver hosts. |
| SDHV-21554 | Prevents crashes in the OpenGL2 driver when loading very large textures by adding proper size handling in the texture conversion paths. |
| SDHV-21552 | Prevents crashes in the OpenGL2 driver when loading very large textures by adding proper size handling in the texture conversion paths. |
| SDHV-21541 | Using an ordered map ensures deterministic drawing order within a batch, resolving the text display issue when anti-aliasing is disabled. |
| SDHV-21539 | Implemented sub-window feature solves this issue |
| SDHV-21527 | Guarded double points usage |
| SDHV-21465 | Fix text border visibility when multiple cases were enabled |
| SDHV-21462 | Abnormal float calculation was happening is this cases, now refuse the computation if impossible |
| SDHV-21460 | Fix segdl batching with adjust condition |
| SDHV-21399 | Improve string line parsing and conversion to use a better and more performant library and algorithm |
| SDHV-21375 | Fix world clipping all behind the eye that previously left clip rendition in a bad state |
| SDHV-21117 | Provide a new HD3DImage.cs to fix gray screen hapening because of a stale buffer |
