Creating Technical Publications – Acrobat 3D
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:
- Author technical publication in native application (InDesign, Framemaker, Word, PPT, etc.)
- Leave space in source document where you want the 3D model inserted
- Create PDF
- Open Acrobat 3D Toolkit (separate application under you Program Files)
- Drag & Drop Model into Acrobat 3D Toolkit
- File – Save As - .u3d
- Open tech pub PDF
- Select 3D Marquee Tool
- Drag a box for the desired location
- Choose .u3d file
- 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