Email Your CAD Model

Design engineers often complain they spend 30% of their time actually designing and about 70% of their time explaining details of their work to others.

Adobe Systems Inc., the company most of us associate with the Adobe Acrobat PDF files we find in our everyday emails, now has an answer: an inexpensive system for sharing information on 3D engineering renderings that is as easy as, well, trading emails.

Product development engineers have for years been using various means to communicate about computer-aided engineering (CAD), but the process remains slow and complicated. Auto makers use different types of expensive design software, multiple hardware systems and different data formats, all of which makes it hard to stay in the loop and keep up with changes, especially for companies further down the supply chain.

Web-based collaborative systems have helped improve the way development team members share information, but they remain far from perfect.

The folks at Adobe hope to simplify this with the Adobe Acrobat 3D system introduced Feb. 1. The system is based on the ubiquitous Adobe Reader software, which is free. Over 1.25 billion copies have been distributed since 1993 the company says.

The Acrobat 3D system is priced at about $1,000. Registered users of Acrobat 6.0 Professional (not free, it costs $400) can upgrade to Acrobat 3D for $700 and registered users of Acrobat 7.0 Professional (also not free, $450) can upgrade to Acrobat 3D for $545. In the world of engineering design software, this is postage stamp money.

With Adobe's new software, engineers easily can convert 3D designs from a wide variety of proprietary CAD formats into cross-platform, Adobe Portable Document Files (PDF). Once embedded in the PDF file, almost anyone can use the free Adobe Reader 7.0 software to review and comment on 3D designs created in various proprietary CAD applications, thereby greatly expanding the universe of people who can answer questions or provide feedback.

Inserting 3D CAD files into the PDF format is as simple as dragging the content into Acrobat 3D; by right-clicking the desired file and selecting the PDF conversion option from a menu; and via a 3D capture utility that allows users to quickly capture a 3D file displayed on screen and convert it to a PDF on computers using Microsoft Windows and UNIX operating systems.

Once renderings of computer-generated components are inserted into a PDF file, they can be viewed, rotated and modified with a pen-like function. Written messages that look like electronic versions of sticky notes also can be attached.

Bahman Dara, Adobe senior product marketing manager-Intelligent Documents, dropped by Ward's offices to provide a demonstration. The product is very similar to Acrobat Professional 6.0 — used every day by journalists to proofread page designs. It was surprising to see how easily it can be converted to heavy-duty engineering use.

Dara also demonstrated how 3D renderings can be sliced up, manipulated and otherwise moved about inside these emailed files.

Last October, product development software giant UGS Corp. announced a technology partnership with Adobe that would allow manufacturing organizations worldwide to tap into the industry's vast reservoir of 3D digital product models stored in the widely adopted JT data format.

“JT is our industry's most widely adopted lightweight 3D format for representing digital product models and Adobe PDF is the de facto standard document format throughout the world. By making millions of 3D product models easy to import into Adobe PDF documents and accessible to anyone with free Adobe Reader software, UGS and Adobe are establishing an open standard for PLM (product lifecycle management) document creation and sharing,” says Alfred Katzenbach, director of Information Technology and IT-Processes at DaimlerChrysler AG's Mercedes Car Group.

Adobe's Dara sums up the product's benefits more succinctly: “One guy told me it saved 100 phone calls a day.”