
This looks handy for collaborative CAD work, but a little pricey at $995 – “Adobe’s Acrobat 3D software lets people view three-dimensional objects with the Acrobat reader, append notes to the images and send them to colleagues. Typically, design engineers today create a two-dimensional image and send them via e-mail, Bhalla said. Having an embedded 3D image, which people can rotate to view and append with notes, will speed up the design collaboration process and reduce errors…” Link.
4 thoughts on “3D PDFS…”
Comments are closed.
My employer decided to jump on the pdf/u3d bandwagon about 9 months ago. Here’s what I learned from the experience:
I did succeed in writing an exporter that worked (modulo lighting and initial camera position) in adobe viewer, without paying a dime to anybody, but it was pretty hellish time at the office.
This has been more or less forgotten since the day last fall we showed it at a conference (and it went OK as a demo, but I don’t think the crowd was that impressed with the technology). I’m dreading the day my supervisor turns up and asks me to get back to work on it.
About 3D PDF generation…
The Acrobat3D package is a little pricey, but fills a gap of a 3D file conversion and 3D PDF authoring tool. However, what happens if you have your own applications with 3D data – are you going to force all users to buy copies of Acrobat3D just to create 3D PDF content? It’s just possible, with considerable work to write your own U3D files, but then you’ve got to use some other package to embed 3D content into the PDF format.
I just noticed PDF3D (www.pdf3d.co.uk) which appears to offer program development tool that simplifies writing 3D PDF generation in custom applications. It’s not free, but looks like it takes the hassle out of the job.