[X3D-Public] Acrobat 3D

[Joshua Smith]

I have a lot of experience with Acrobat 3D.

Unlike the rest of the PDF standard, the 3D part is highly unstable.  By this, I mean that they keep changing how things work in non-backward-compatible ways.  This makes it a real pain in the neck format to support as a content creator, because you have to keep updating your customer's PDFs when the platform changes.

The team that works on it is very CAD-focused.  This reveals itself in many ways:

1) A built-in camera mouse navigation scheme that CAD guys understand, and everyone else finds inscrutable (thankfully, you can override this with a lot of Javascript);

2) A terrible software rendering engine, and a hardware engine that requires relatively recent 3D hardware & drivers;

3) No sorting, so it cannot render scenes with transparency correctly;

Also, multimedia integration is non-existant.  You get 3D in a box, and PDF outside the box, and that's that.  Want to put some nice rendered text into the scene?  Nope.  Want sound?  Nope.  Want video?  Nope.  X3D's multimedia capabilities are bad, but 3D PDF's are much worse.

Finally, like X3D, the compression sucks.

I'd gladly kill it as a supported format in my company, except that our customers LOVE IT, despite all these problems.  In the sales & marketing world, the ability to stuff a 3D model into a PDF is absolutely huge.

Further reading: http://www1.kaon.com/kb/category.php?id=9

On Jan 4, 2010, at 4:13 PM, Charles Lamb wrote:

> Does anyone see Acrobat 3D http://www.adobe.com/devnet/acrobat3d/ as a rival
> to X3D?  I have yet to look at it in detail but it has a major advantage in
> that there is single standard plugin which is trusted by nearly all
> potential users.  VRML is on the list of supported formats,
> http://www.adobe.com/manufacturing/resources/3dformats/, but X3D isn't.
> In my opinion X3D suffers from the handicap that there isn't a single source
> for a free X3D browser for all systems.  Support is scattered amongst
> various platform licensed and free browsers.
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Charles P. Lamb
> 
> 
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