Several CAD system independent feature recognition techniques have been developed to drive manufacturing applications. Commercial implementations of these techniques require translating CAD models using STEP or other neutral file formats. With large CAD models found in some application domains; e.g., powertrain machining, corresponding STEP files are also large. This leads to large processing times. Another approach is to use lightweight formats such as STL or VRML. Here, complete & accurate parameter extraction is difficult because these formats approximate surfaces as tessellations. This paper discusses a new methodology for feature recognition, in which a VRML file is used for feature identification. To some extent, parameters of faces with simple surface-types are recovered from the tessellated model. If identified features consist of faces whose parameters are not recovered from the tessellated model, a partial STEP file translation is used for extracting exact parameters. This CAD system independent algorithmic development and implementation reduces the amount of data exported to neutral files, thus leading to more efficient feature recognition.