Unlocking Engineering's Bottleneck: The Quiet Revolution in Simulation

BEND, Ore. & LONDON – July 01, 2026 – In the relentless pursuit of innovation, we often fixate on the final, polished product—the sleek electric vehicle, the next-generation aircraft, the life-saving medical device. We rarely spare a thought for the invisible architecture of digital tools that makes it all possible. Yet, it is here, in the unglamorous world of software handshakes and data translation, that the most significant leaps forward are often made. A recent partnership between Tech Soft 3D and Arup's Oasys software team is a case in point, representing a quiet but profound revolution for engineers working at the cutting edge of physical simulation.

The collaboration centers on the integration of Tech Soft 3D's HOOPS Exchange, a specialized software development kit (SDK), into Oasys PRIMER 23, a critical pre-processing tool for the Ansys LS-DYNA simulation environment. The result is a massive expansion of Oasys PRIMER's ability to import computer-aided design (CAD) files, jumping from a mere three supported formats to sixteen. While this may sound like a minor technical update, its real-world impact represents the removal of a significant and costly bottleneck in modern engineering workflows.

The Engineer's Dilemma: A Data Traffic Jam

For years, simulation engineers have wrestled with a persistent and frustrating problem: data interoperability. In a typical product development cycle, design teams create complex 3D models in a variety of native CAD systems, such as CATIA, SOLIDWORKS, or Creo. Before these designs can be tested for stress, impact, or thermal performance in a simulation environment like LS-DYNA, the geometry must be imported into a pre-processing tool like Oasys PRIMER.

Historically, this has been a major point of friction. The previous version of PRIMER supported only three neutral file formats (IGES, STEP, and JT). While useful, this limitation often forced engineers into a tedious, multi-step process of converting files from their native format. Each conversion step introduced the risk of data corruption, loss of fidelity, and the introduction of errors that could compromise the entire simulation. An engineer might spend hours, or even days, cleaning up a poorly translated model before the actual analysis work could even begin.

“Our customers work with CAD data from many different systems, and our previous solution of importing IGES, JT, and STEP files was very limiting,” said Andrew White, Oasys PRIMER Product Manager and Associate at Arup. The integration of HOOPS Exchange directly addresses this pain point. Now, users of PRIMER 23 can directly import files from 16 different systems, including native formats from Autodesk Inventor, NX, and SOLIDWORKS. This eliminates the need for intermediate translation steps, preserving the integrity of the original design data and, most importantly, freeing up engineers to focus on analysis and innovation rather than data wrangling.

The Power of the SDK: A Strategic Symbiosis

This advancement highlights a powerful strategy in the software world: leveraging specialized expertise through SDKs rather than attempting to build everything in-house. Arup, a global engineering powerhouse, has spent decades developing the Oasys LS-DYNA Environment into a premier suite for simulation preparation. Their core competency lies in creating the sophisticated tools engineers need to build, refine, and manage complex simulation models for LS-DYNA, a solver renowned for its use in crash testing and impact analysis.

Developing and maintaining translators for dozens of ever-evolving CAD formats, however, is a monumental task in itself. It’s a full-time specialization. By choosing to integrate Tech Soft 3D’s HOOPS Exchange, Arup effectively outsourced this challenge to a company whose entire business is built around CAD data interoperability. Tech Soft 3D has dedicated years to perfecting its translators, ensuring they can read not just the geometry but also critical metadata, product structure, and manufacturing information with high fidelity.

This “buy versus build” decision is a model of strategic efficiency. It allows the Oasys team to continue investing its resources in its core mission—enhancing the pre-processing capabilities that its users depend on—while delivering a best-in-class solution for CAD import. The result is a more powerful and versatile product for the end-user, delivered faster and more reliably than if Arup had tried to reinvent the wheel. As Andrew White noted, “Tech Soft 3D’s HOOPS Exchange enabled us to broaden support CAD formats, giving PRIMER users much more flexibility when preparing models for simulation.”

Beyond a Feature: Fueling the Digital Thread

Positioning this update as a mere feature enhancement would be to miss the forest for the trees. The seamless flow of data between design and simulation is a foundational pillar of the modern digital enterprise. Industry-wide initiatives like Simulation-Driven Design (SDD), the digital twin, and the digital thread all hinge on the ability to move data effortlessly and accurately between different stages of the product lifecycle.

SDD pushes simulation to the front of the design process, allowing engineers to test and validate ideas virtually before committing to physical prototypes. A digital twin—a virtual replica of a physical product or system—relies on a constant stream of data to simulate performance and predict failures. The digital thread is the connective tissue that links all this data together, from initial concept to manufacturing and in-service operation.

None of these transformative concepts can be realized if the data is stuck in proprietary silos. The integration of HOOPS Exchange into Oasys PRIMER is a practical, on-the-ground example of how these data silos are being dismantled. It creates a smoother, more flexible path from design to analysis, which is precisely the kind of workflow improvement needed to accelerate innovation.

“By integrating HOOPS Exchange into Oasys PRIMER 23, they are giving Ansys LS-DYNA users a more flexible path from design geometry to simulation pre-processing,” said Marco Salino, Product Manager at Tech Soft 3D. “This is exactly the kind of workflow improvement HOOPS Exchange is built to support.” By making it easier to iterate between design and analysis, this seemingly simple software update helps organizations make better decisions faster, reduce costly physical testing, and ultimately bring superior products to market.

The Technical Underpinnings of Trust

For a simulation to be of any value, the input data must be trustworthy. A core technical advantage of using a mature SDK like HOOPS Exchange is the emphasis on data fidelity. The toolkit is designed to preserve not just the visible geometry (Boundary Representation or B-REP) but also the underlying Product Manufacturing Information (PMI), such as tolerances and annotations, which can be critical for accurate analysis. This ensures that the model being simulated is a true and accurate representation of the design intent.

Furthermore, this robust interoperability is provided without requiring the original CAD system to be installed on the engineer's machine, simplifying licensing and deployment across large organizations. The partnership also signals a long-term commitment. Arup has already indicated it hopes to expose even more of the 30+ file formats supported by HOOPS Exchange to its users in the future, suggesting an evolving roadmap dedicated to breaking down barriers.

In the end, progress is often built on a foundation of unheralded improvements. While a more interoperable software tool may not capture headlines, the accumulated hours it saves and the errors it prevents are the very currency of innovation. This strategic partnership demonstrates how focusing on the fundamental plumbing of the digital world is what truly enables engineers to build the future.