Why and when should you use hoops 3d graphics?

Question

My company needs 3D visualization for our commercial applications (CAD, mesh manipulation, computational geometry). We are tired of true vision 3D (tv3d), which we've been using for years (poor support, compatibility problems).

Our manager wants to use hoops 3d from tech soft 3D for software development. While I have no experience of it, my prejudices are:

1. Overpriced
2. Relatively few users - poor support
3. Old and outdated

Am I wrong about Hoops 3d? What is your experience? Is Hoops useful? Advantages? Disadvantages?

Answer 1

Several years ago I was involved in a project that used HOOPs. The company didn't want to pay royalties any more and wasn't very convinced that HOOPs was the right product for them so I ported all the HOOPs functionality they used over to OpenGL. I have summarised my experience of this below but you will have to determine what is relevant for your projects.

Disadvantages/costs for that project:

• Needed to write object picking (HOOPs supplied that)
• Needed to write virtual trackball (HOOPs supplied that) [although sample code to do this is freely available]
• Had to move some data storage from HOOPs over to our own data structures

Advantages for that project:

• Able to use features of OpenGL such as transparency (although surely HOOPs has that by now?)
• Lots of resources to find help with OpenGL
• Better performance (for our case - I don't know if this is still true as it seems HOOPs uses OpenGL/DirectX underneath now)
• Better support for consumer-priced graphics cards & laptops
• More flexibility to go beyond what HOOPs thinks you should need to do

The big wins were the resources to find help and greater flexibility.