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Adobe 3D allows CAD drawings to be portable

Design and graphics group Adobe Systems is making a play for the manufacturing and engineering markets with the latest version of its Acrobat PDF (portable data file) creation technology, which can hold and display 3D information.

Acrobat 3D enables engineering drawings to be sent in a PDF format, unwrapped by the receiver and then manipulated in 3D, as they would with a CAD system.

The CAD drawings can be rotated, have parts made transparent or invisible, or cross-sectioned. And the receiver of the 3D file does not have to have the CAD technology that created it.

If the 3D drawing is imported from a CAD file into a PDF document, the system preserves the 3D model’s file structure, including part names and hierarchy. If the CAD file is not available or not supported, the file structure will not transfer during the capture of the 3D image.

The new Acrobat enables a wider range of collaboration with the different views or slices that can be seen and can be used in “synchronous” or “asynchronous” modes, in which feedback from the viewers can be attached to the file for return, and then accepted or rejected by the originator.

Group product marketing manager Rajeev Kak said the introduction of Acrobat 3D was part of a wider move by Adobe to “move away from a horizontal business approach towards individual job functions”.

Engineering drawings had been identified as a major potential business area because of the number of companies already using earlier versions of PDF to transfer fixed-view information in design collaborations or up and down supply chains.

The new version would also enable more realistic representations of 3D devices to be shown to departments such as marketing that might struggle to visualise 2D drawings, Kak added.