adobe 8Gone are the days of your typical PDF. Adobe is cranking up the possibilities with Acrobat Version 8 3D and they’re on top of the issues to make you look as cool as possible.

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I wrote previously about Acrobat 8 3D. At that time it was great with small to medium size models, but there were some issues that made converting large models, particularly assembly files, difficult which resulted in large PDF file sizes. The PDF files sizes were quite a bit larger than the original file, which made it harder to use as a collaboration tool. That is no longer the case.

The Perfect Size
After talking with the Adobe Acrobat development team about this and providing them with large assembly data to work with, they’ve made major improvements to 3D model conversion that has been released in the new upgrade. The latest version is 8.1.1. The test was a 17.1 MB assembly file (10,858 parts, 578MB total). Here are the results.

Conversion Acrobat 3D 8.0 Acrobat 3D 8.1.1
PRC Tessellation Uncompressed 113MB 25MB
PRC Tessellation Compressed 39MB 10MB
PRC B-rep Uncompressed N/A 65MB
PRC B-rep Compressed N/A 15MB

That is a huge decrease in file size and makes it much easier to send via email and package into a product release. If you’ve had trouble with your files sizes before, try the update and see if you get better result. I think you’ll be happy with the outcome.

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Author

Josh is founder and editor at SolidSmack.com, founder at Aimsift Inc., and co-founder of EvD Media. He is involved in engineering, design, visualization, the technology making it happen, and the content developed around it. He is a SolidWorks Certified Professional and excels at falling awkwardly.