Acrobat 3D Corner

CASE STUDY

Build Your Own Car prototype

Use engineering design data to create consumer sales tools with game-like interactivity and quality

Challenge

Most car manufacturers offer some kind of online build-your-own-car web page where a visitor selects a car model, the color, several options and ends up with a printable web page with a 2D picture that represents the car with the options they selected. The end result is useful, but the experience, while novel 10 years ago, feels relatively flat today.

Daniel Beardsley was asked to prototype an interactive 3D PDF version of the build-your-own-car concept. The goal was to replicate the online web site features such as choosing colors, finishes and details, but enhance the experience using real engineering design data and interactive photorealistic 3D. Using 3D PDF and the universally available Acrobat Reader meant no special plug-ins would be required for viewing and distribution and printing would be simplified for both on or offline.

Solution

The prototype CAD model created by Todd Danielle, was converted using the Acrobat 3D Toolkit and optimized to reduce the polygon count as small as possible, but to retain the visual fidelity of car.

Beardsley then designed an interface and added Javascripting that would let a user select colors, and detailing. Other features of interest include:

• custom camera motion limited to smooth motion with intelligent viewing angles
  (e.g you can't flip the car over)
  
  
• animated textures for the wheel motion
  
  
• animated lights (overhead lights move when the car is in motion).

Concept Car Customization Prototype
Lets customers "build their own car".
Download [PDF: 7.5 MB]  

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