Communicate in 3D

One of the most compelling new features in Acrobat 3D 8 is the portable PRC format. This is the magic that allows for large assemblies, high compression that stores exact geometry, and the tolerances necessary for export to STEP or IGES for manufacturing. Specifically it enables:

• assemblies and parts
• tree of 3D entities : coordinate systems, wireframe, surfaces and solids,
• exact geometry representation
• tessellated (triangulated) representation
• markup
• regular compression : enables to represent DIRECTLY CAD data without loss or transformation from the originating CAD system.
• high compression : enables to store very small files, which are at a given physical tolerance from the originating shape. Tolerance is typically 0.001 mm for exact geometry and 0.01 mm for tessellation.

Adobe has released the PRC specification in the Acrobat 3D Developer Center

This means that developers can start building Acrobat 3D 8 plug-ins to manipulate PRC files or CAD and 3D Modeling developers can create applications that read and write PRC format files and Acrobat 3D 8-compatible PDFs.