So where does Acrobat 3D fit in in the mix of uses for 3D?
Google Earth, Second Life, COLLADA, X3D and of course 3D PDF. These are all 3D solutions that are all very viable 3D technologies that are addressing various needs in the market. So lets try to break down markets a little:
Social Networking and Interaction:
Second Life and World of Warcraft are the two big mind-share products in this space. They are not so much about the 3D as they are about transactions and social interaction. By using 3D, some of the abstraction required in 2D communications (email or telephone) is reduced. The 3D acts primarily as a way to duplicate the familiarity of the real world. While you can build some fancy 3D objects, the 3D is not the focus, it is simply the tool
Location-based 3D:
This is the turf of Google Earth, Virtual Earth and related 3D mapping technologies from Autodesk, ESRI and Intergraph. The 3D can be pretty much anything, from people to objects. It might be static objects or the objects could support animation and layers. Annotation and collaboration is an optional add in. But the key defining element here is that the location of the 3D objects matters. All objects are tied to a geospatial location. This is great for things like city planning, real-estate, civil engineering presentations, anything related to mapping, or location-relevant advertising. The 3D is a useful way to help make the the 2D data from maps and GIS analyses less abstract. While a map with topography lines might be difficult to interpret, a 3D map showing actual hills and valleys is immediately interpretable by everyone. 3D is also used to provide context. The “props” of trees or automobiles in a scenes, simply make the scene more familiar so it can be more intuitively comprehended.
Simulation and 3D application development:
VRML and the newer X3D try to address this very broad market, with a primary focus on web-based simulation and presentation. It is a developer format and not an end user solution. If you need to develop a custom solution for a vertical market that has strong interactivity and programmability, this technology is a good open standard. While not as good in terms of performance as proprietary tools, it is fully open and has some nice device scalability. The focus is generally on simulation - letting people build applications to test out how something works before actually having to do a “dry run”.
Collaboration:
Manufacturers, Designers and Engineers spend a lot of time creating valuable 3D product data assets. But the clear advantages of 3D as a tool to reduce the level of abstraction in technical data, don’t materialize if the data isn’t available to everyone who could benefit from it. Users need effective 3D collaboration. In this case the users refer to everybody from engineers, QA, and production to finance, marketing, and upper management. Effective collaboration means: ease of use, ease of creation, ease of being able to comment or give feedback, security, and integration with other data. Sounds like a list of features in 3D PDFs, no?
Before going any further, let me clarify that a 3D PDF and Acrobat 3D are related but distinct things. A 3D PDF is the document you end up with and distribute. Acrobat 3D is the authoring environment for that document.
That said, 3D PDFs and Acrobat 3D combine to address several markets and offer a unique solution in several respects.
- The Acrobat Reader is ubiquitous and free, so anyone on any platform (Win, Mac, Linux/UNIX) can view 3D PDFs - no special plug-ins, no game environments, no requirement to even be online. Better yet - PDFs have already been accepted as a market standard by almost anyone at any level who uses a computer. So you don’t run up against the technophobia that is common with other new technologies. While Acrobat 3D is initially targeted at the manufacturing industry: e.g. users of Bentley Systems, UGS, PTC and SolidWorks , 3D PDFs are not limited to CAD experts and engineers. They are useable and understandable by everyone from the CFO to the engineer to the CTO to the folks in the marketing department. The tools scale with the sophistication of the participating collaborator/reviewer. The familiarity and ease of use of the PDF reduces the level of abstraction and expertise needed to understand 3D data.
- Acrobat 3D imports most PLM and mechanical CAD formats and Acrobat Capture (part of Acrobat 3D) can grab 3D models from almost all 3D applications in professional Manufacturing, CAD, Engineering, Architecture, Entertainment and Industrial Design, Because Acrobat Capture is capturing an “OpenGL stream”, information about the whole 3D model is passed to Acrobat and this includes dimensional and scale information. So this means that Acrobat 3D can in many ways bypass the entire problem of constantly trying to keep your CAD/3D translation software up to date.
- Also on the unique front - 3D PDFs can be emailed easily and securely.
- 3D PDFs can integrate other information from multiple file types into one integrated PDF. This means that one document can combine tabular data, reports and 3D. It makes the process of understanding 3D much easier if you are not having to hop around between documents and applications. (of course with commenting you can do a lot of specific calling out right in the 3D model). But how it simplifies things if your order form and your 3D parts model are integrated. You click on a component and you get information on a part. (Check out this example).
- With Acrobat 3D you can create annotations - essentially these are annotated views of a model so you can point out significant aspects or add comments about particular 3D views.
- 3D PDFs allow Javascript control of 3D animation and interactivity - not only is this unbelievably cool, but it means that coders can make your 3D come to life, access database information, or simply make the experience more “game-like” and less intimidating. It also means that you can distribute your workload. Engineers do the CAD, perhaps even create the animations in Acrobat 3D Toolkit. Then they let the coders and UI folks do the scripting and presentation. Collaboration is about more than just sharing 3D models. It is about presenting that 3D in an understandable way.
- Commenting let you add callouts to your 3D document that are attached to actual model views. You rotate the object to the appropriate view and then use digital highlighters, pens, callouts, clouds, and dimension lines to add notes. By adding electronic notes on areas to give dimensions or descriptions of how something is assembled, suppliers or manufacturers for instance have fewer questions. If you enable the option in Acrobat 3D, the tools in free Acrobat Reader provide reviewers an effective way to give clear, concise feedback. This is of course the most obvious aspect to collaboration. Every comments or asks questions directly on the model, so that it is much more difficult to miscommunicate.
