Adobe advances its position in CAD world with Acrobat 3D

Adobe today is announcing its newest Acrobat family product, Adobe Acrobat 3D. With Acrobat 3D engineering and technical professionals can now publish and share 3D design and engineering information with virtually any computer user on any computer platform.

Designed to extend beyond Acrobat Professional, Acrobat 3D can take 3D CAD data from most major CAD applications, enabling remote team members, clients and consultants the ability to collaborate better, thus resulting in improved accuracy and reductions in design and manufacturing costs. Acrobat 3D can enable "mark-up" functionality to PDF files which in turn provide team members using the free Adobe Reader 7.0 application to review and add comments directly onto 3D objects embedded directly within the Adobe PDF files. Better yet, these Adobe Reader 7.0 users can work 'interactively' with these embedded 3D content objects, turning them in space, measuring them with built-in dimension tools, zoom and pan, change render modes, and pause and play animation, to name just a few of the features in the Acrobat 3D toolbar. The toolbar appears automatically when you select a 3D object in an Acrobat 3D produced PDF document.

Adobe Acrobat 3D

While Adobe Acrobat 7 Professional has the ability to embed 3D designs in PDF documents (with included interactivity), Acrobat 3D adds three fundamentally big additions to the application that will take the CAD world much further in advanced collaboration then previously thought.

The first major addition found only in Acrobat 3D is the ability to work with 3D design data from nearly all major CAD and many 3D applications. Acrobat Professional limits what 3d data you can integrate into PDF documents. Acrobat 3D supports all these formats: Autocad .dxf, catia 4 and 5, ptc, proE, .step, .iges, .sat, solidworks, .vrml, .u3d and .obj. (we cover how you get this data in Acrobat 3D in a separate report).

The second unique feature is the ability for Acrobat 3D to insert 3D CAD design data into Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint and then convert to PDF. With Acrobat 3D enabled to work with Microsoft Office, you will find additional menu options and buttons that provide additional integration functionality.

Lastly, Acrobat 3D enables you to create rich, interactive documents with 3D content. From Acrobat 3D you can add materials, change lighting, create animations such as exploded views, cut sectional views through the 3D model and save as 3D objects or 2D raster/vector images.

Platform Support and Costs

At the moment, Acrobat 3D is limited in its platform support and language localization. This is due to several factors which we cover in a separate report. Adobe for the moment is moving slowly with this product as it discovers the market's uptake in it. Initially this product is oriented towards the manufacturing industry and Adobe's partners in this product reflect that.

Acrobat 3D is available for Windows only with the Acrobat 3D Capture Utility also available for UNIX platforms in just the following localized languages: English, International English, French, German and Japanese. Adobe plans on supporting this product further with other languages and platforms. Acrobat product manager, Patrick Aragon, has told Architosh that nothing is precluding them from developing a version for Mac OS X and that if the market responds by requesting a native Mac OS X version of Acrobat 3D, Adobe is willing to produce one.

Acrobat 3D cost $995USD for a new license and is available for an upgrade price from Adobe Acrobat Professional 6 and 7 for $699USD and $545USD, respectively.

To learn more go to: www.adobe.com

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