Jonathan Bowman’s AEC & EPC Blog

A great source of information that can be found on the Adobe website is the recorded eSeminars that we have done through out the year. Over the past couple of months we have held several on Acrobat 3D and Tim Huff has put on a weekly eSeminar series for AEC. Usually the first question we get during the live event is will this be recorded? The answer is yes, and the next question is “where do I find these?” The easiest way I have found to get to the main events page is to navigate directly there. The Adobe Events page can be found at http://www.adobe.com/events. On the right hand side of the page you can see the OnDemand link which will take you there. You can then filter by product and also by industry.

Have fun,

Jonathan

Posted by Jonathan Bowman at 09:43 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

One of the great workflows that extends the lifecycle of your 3D assets is creating technical publications.  How many times today do you use the 3D asset after detailed engineering?  Technical Publications are a great way of doing things like assembly/disassembly instructions, proof of concept, product manuals, etc. You can see some examples of technical publications at the bottom of the Acrobat 3D examples webpage.  To get started with technical publications you need to know a couple tips & tricks to get you started.

The first thing you need to know is how to get your 3D asset into the tech pub in the desired location.  The key to starting any technical publication is that you must first get your asset into a .u3d file format before inserting it into the pdf.  So you are probably asking yourself why do I need to do this?  If you just drag and drop the asset into Acrobat 3D it creates its own page.  If you have the asset in a .u3d format you can use the 3D Marquee Tool to position and insert the 3D model into page in the desired location.

 

I have created a demo that can be viewed here.  (It takes a minute to load.)

 

Steps you need to take:

1. Author technical publication in native application (InDesign, Framemaker, Word, PPT, etc.)
2. Leave space in source document where you want the 3D model inserted
3. Create PDF
4. Open Acrobat 3D Toolkit (separate application under you Program Files)
5. Drag & Drop Model into Acrobat 3D Toolkit
6. File – Save As - .u3d
7. Open tech pub PDF
8. Select 3D Marquee Tool
9. Drag a box for the desired location
10. Choose .u3d file
11. Select Hand Tool to activate 3D

 

What is even better about this is now you can use all of your Acrobat functionality to make the technical publication more interactive.  In the demo above I show you how to set a “link” to call a specific 3D view.  If you look at the examples on the Adobe website it shows examples where links and buttons call java scripts to perform the animations originally setup in the native 3D CAD application.  There is a whole host of capabilities.

 

I hope this helped.  It is a common question I get when speaking at tradeshows and industry events. 

 

Have fun,

 

Jonathan

Posted by Jonathan Bowman at 10:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This is a very simple process.  The key is that you have to have Adobe Illustrator installed on your computer.  All you have to do is open the PDF in Adobe Illustrator and save the file as a .dxf file format.  Then you simply open the .dxf in AutoCAD.

For other file formats you can simply use the Export menu option to be able to export a pdf document as another file format.  In previous versions to Acrobat 8, you would simply do a File-Save As and change the file format type.  This is typically used for Word, Html/XML, and Image file formats.

 

For Excel the process is described in an early blog entry and can be found here.

 

To prevent other users from using the Export feature you can apply a Permissions Password for your document security that prevents users from extracting the content.

 

Have fun,

 

Jonathan

Posted by Jonathan Bowman at 02:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

We are just wrapping up trade show season and it was a huge success. Two weeks ago we released Acrobat 3D version 8 and we updated the content on the website. With the new conversion format of PRC Brep you need to have Reader 8.1 to view the files.

Have fun,

Jonathan

Posted by Jonathan Bowman at 02:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In the new release of Acrobat 3D version 8, you have the ability to export the model back out of the pdf.  The file formats we support for this are STEP, IGES, VRML, and Parasolid.  There are a couple of tips and tricks though I thought you should know.

The first thing to know is that you must use the PRC B-rep format during the conversion.  You can see where this is selected in the figure below.

 

 

The second thing to know is how you export the data once the model has been converted.  To do this you must click on the 3D model to activate the model.  Once the model has been activated you simply right click and choose Export Data as shown in the figure below.

 

 

Once you do this you will have the ability to choose the file format in which you wish to export the data.  Your options include STEP, IGES, VRML and Parasolid as shown in the figure below.

 

 

I hope this helped.  It is one of the great new features for Acrobat 3D version 8. 

 

Have fun,

 

Jonathan

Posted by Jonathan Bowman at 10:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)