Software company TechSoft has offered its HOOPS 3D graphics component to the LDraw community for FREE to use for developing new software!

According to the HOOPS 3D web site, it is the "core graphics engine in over 150 shipping applications - ranging from lightweight web plug-ins to heavyweight MCAD packages, CAE pre and post-processors and cover every type of CAD/CAM/CAE solution in between on Windows, UNIX, Linux and event Windows-CE based handheld devices."

Yanick Fluhmann of TechSoft has offered to spend a little time discussing the software with LDraw developers. If you are a developer who wants to gain access to these tools, you can contact Yanick via email at yanick@techsoftamerica.com.

You can check out the HOOPS 3D Part Viewer via the following links:

• HOOPS 3D Part Viewer
• HOOPS 3D Part Viewer for Parasolid
• HOOPS 3D Part Viewer for ACIS
• Free Development Environment for the full HOOPS/3dAF for Linux
• HOOPS/3dAF Reference Applications
• HOOPS/3dAF Documentation

Mac OS X support is coming in the next release of HOOPS 3D.