There’s an interesting review of Adobe’s new Acrobat 3D application over on CGArchitect. I don’t know anyone that’s using it yet, but I assume that it will work its way into some product development toolsets; although at US $995 I don’t see it finding space in mine any time soon. Anyway, here’s the part of the review that caught my attention (Link):
There is also a third, more direct way for AEC users to get 3D content into Acrobat 3D from those CAD and BIM applications that support the OpenGL rendering mode. This is through the built-in 3D Capture utility, based on an OpenGL model capture technology developed by a French company, OKYZ, that Adobe acquired in December 2004. It allows users to quickly capture a 3D file displayed on screen in OpenGL mode and convert it to Adobe PDF.
Does that sound like anything I’ve been playing with? (*cough* … OGLE … *cough*).
Perhaps I should email the author, Lachmi Khemlani, and tell her to try it instead. Between OGLE and a free model viewer (like plyview, perhaps), that $995 is looking pretty outlandish … especially since grabbing the videostream data like that has been around for years.
I was SUPER excited to see the 3D pdf’s because all of our controlled documents are stored in pdf format. We don’t have a good system for sharing 3D data with non-CAD users and this looked like a good solution. But the price of the publisher… Sheesh. Maybe this is good reason to try OGLE within Pro/E. Anyone know of a utility to wrap a .obj file in a 3D pdf?
My guess is that it’s only a matter of time before the big 3D software companies bundle 3D pdf export in their software.
I’ve thinking the same thing and expect to see OpenOffice perhaps include this capability in their near future.
otoh, in the meantime people could use the .wrl format or .x3d (even though that requires a browser plug-in).