Engineers working with 3-D data in the major CAD and product lifecycle management apps find plenty to praise in Acrobat 3D.The new Acrobat 3D isn't for everybody, and to the office worker who's converting Web pages to PDF or making them from Microsoft Office apps, the $995 price tag might seem pretty steep.
But according to some early adopters, the people who need it—those working with three-dimensional data in the major CAD and product lifecycle management apps—will definitely think it's worth it.
Early adopters said that Acrobat 3D either brings 3-D data into PDFs that couldn't be put there before, or streamlines productivity by reducing the number of utilities a 3-D rendering must go through before it can be exported to PDF.
This process creates a better quality rendering and helps to decrease on maintenance fees for expensive specialty software.
Faster and Better
Nick Butkovich, project manager for Bradrock Industries, a 100-employee company that manufactures plastic moldings and assemblies for car makers, said the biggest advantage of Acrobat 3D is that his company can get PDFs from the engineers to the quality control crew out in the plant faster.
And Doug Dominick, president of Atrus—a small consulting company that provides design engineering support for product development in the aerospace, appliance and heavy truck industries—said that Acrobat 3D creates similar efficiencies in his company's document control and distribution workflow.
"It saves us many steps in that we now create a single file versus several screen captures converted into a common file type," Domanick said.
Before using Acrobat 3D, adds Jeff Walker, one of Atrus's two principal mechanical engineers, the company could only show clients some renderings through a series of two-dimensional images.
With Acrobat 3D-generated PDFs containing OpenGL data from its CAD, FEA (Finite Element Analysis), and CFD software, Atrus can show angles of a design that were previously only visible in the native files—which weren't always installed on the customers' computers.
"If the customer wants to see a detail of the design, they can spin, pan and zoom the model [in the PDF] themselves in order to answer their question," Walker said.
Click here to read more about Adobe Acrobat 3D.
Butkovich said this pan-and-zoom ability helps his quality control people and shift foremen see parts and molds "a whole heck of a lot" better, thereby answering questions more quickly.
Keeping Secrets Safe
Acrobat 3D includes all the features of Acrobat Professional, bringing all of the software's security and markup features to 3-D design documents—some of which include sensitive product-design data used in very competitive markets.
"A couple of [potential customers] are notorious for having you start a design. You send them what you've got in a drawing file, and they send it off to China and say 'quote this,'" Butkovich said. "You get screwed, because they don't pay you but you're doing preliminary work and stuff like that."
To combat the problem, he says, Bradrock now sends preliminary drawings in PDF made in Acrobat 3D with "a couple minor dimensions shown" but the bulk of the numbers hidden to the customer, thus keeping intellectual property under wraps that hitherto had been exposed to the competition.
Once Bradrock gets a deposit to produce a mold, it reveals the hidden data to the customer.
Saving Clients Money
Being able to pass 3-D renderings around for comment in PDF—instead of native application files or paper—also saves time.
Furthermore, Dominick said that he sees Atrus taking advantage of Acrobat's ability to put many different document formats into a PDF to assemble many aspects of a project into a single file, keeping everything from renderings to formal reports to records of day-to-day client interaction in one place.
"We've been able to reduce the number of on-site design reviews required with our clients, thus reducing our nonbillable travel time," Domanick said.
"Considering that many times we have two engineers traveling over an hour, each way, to a client's office, the ROI occurs fairly quickly."
What would Domanick and Butkovich like to see added to the software? Both said that a universal 3-D translator that they haven't seen but were told would ship with Acrobat 3D would be very useful, eliminating a batch of third-party translators they're paying.
Walker, the engineer working with the nuts and bolts of the PDFs, adds that he'd like to see real-time collaboration, improved interaction with OKYZ's Pro|Engineer application and interactive cross-section views in the PDFs.
