Communicate in 3D

Everyone and their mother is talking about the newly announced Photoshop CS3 Extended - the big news being how it will add a new set of capabilities for integration of 3D graphics (e.g. See arstechnica for an example.)

So exactly what are these 3D capabilities and how do they relate to Acrobat 3D?

The official Adobe Photoshop CS3 Extended website doesn’t offer too much detail (i.e. “Easily render and incorporate rich 3D content into your 2D composites—even edit existing textures on 3D models directly within Photoshop Extended and immediately see the results. Photoshop Extended supports common 3D interchange formats, including 3DS, OBJ, U3D, KMZ, and COLLADA, so you can import, view, and interact with most 3D models.”) So all we know from this is that U3D (an Acrobat 3D format) will be supported for importing into Photoshop to be able to create paintable composites - interesting certainly, especially if all you care about is rendering out still image composites.

But from a few early “First Look” articles we know a bit more (e.g. First Look: Photoshop CS3 Extended) Specifically we know that you can import in a U3D model, edit the textures using the familiar tools in Photoshop, and then save the textures back to the U3D model. In other words, you can use Photoshop CS3 Extended as your real-time 3D texture editor for your Acrobat 3D models. Now this is cool and very significant.

The Acrobat 3D toolkit lets you import textures and apply them to models, but you can do very little to actually manipulate the textures on the model. With Photoshop CS3 Extended, texture editing becomes a simple and integrated part of your Acrobat 3D workflow. Nice!

But I don’t think that is really all there is. As I was looking at the screen shots for 3D texture editing and 3D object manipulation in Photoshop, it struck me how similar the interface looked to Acrobat 3D with the same basic object manipulation tools, similar lighting options, cross sectioning, etc. In fact it looks a lot like the Acrobat 3D engine. I am speculating at this point, but my guess is that they are based on the same technology and that once Photoshop CS3 Extended is actually released, we will see additional support for some of the new features in Acrobat 3D 8 (such as the near-universal file format compatibility, high performance engine, and perhaps even some sort of file interchange).

You will get a very complete and very smooth workflow efficiency for Acrobat 3D and 3D PDF that you can’t get with any of the other CAD Data Visualization products (e.g. Autodesk DWF or e-drawings). This is going to remove one of the serious barriers that has been holding the CAD visualization market back.