What is 3D Publishing and Why Should Anyone Care?
The article details the reasons designers and engineers should care about 3D publishing opportunties
For years, I have listened to various CAD
companies say how they promote openness and standardization. They have
been saying that their formats can be used downstream in any
application. You hear the "draw it once and use it many times" theme
bantered around. What an excellent idea. The design engineer, the
manufacturer, the marketing team, the documentation team can all use
the same 3D models. Correct?
WRONG. DESPITE THE BEST marketing words in the world, repurposing of 3D
data simply has not been possible. Corp-orations send millions of
dollars each year to their selected software companies. They create
hundreds of thousands of CAD drawings that are core to their business.
In the manufacturing world today, virtually everything that is
manufactured has numerous associated CAD files as well as several other
data documents. But most of these files are not usable beyond the
engineering department. They may be developed on a proprietary system,
be extremely large and are not readable in downstream software products.Benefits of 3D Publishing
How have companies dealt with this? One example is the creation of
customer manuals. It is a very bulky, manual and analog process: as a
new consumer product is designed or upgraded, each subsequent
department has to wait for each prior cycle to complete so they can
recreate visual design data in a format they can use. A 3D design is
released to the production teams, at which point two-dimensional,
hand-drawn drawings are created for the manuals and instructions. The
packaging and logistical departments have "dead-time" until the data
they need is transmitted down to them in, again, recreated, often
hand-drawn formats. Once the product is in production, experienced
graphics designers need to manually translate the product design into
graphics for the customer manuals. This very lengthy process is a giant
bottleneck especially in markets where even a few days' delays could
mean the company misses being first-to-market with a product. There has
to be a viable solution. And that solution is 3D publishing. 3D
publishing enables en-gineering and non-engineering staff to quickly
and easily use CAD data in training, documentation, support and
mar-keting needs. 3D publishing provides high resolution images that
are a fraction of the original size and in a format that can be read
and used by different software products. This "repurposing" of CAD data
allows a company to realize the software investment, reduce
time-to-market, slash documentation costs, and improve support
solutions.3D Publishing Versus CAD
For success, 3D publishing needs to alleviate problems with proprietary
CAD formats as well as the file-size problems that 3D brings. Simply
put, major 3D assemblies are usually extra-large files which are
difficult to handle. Most CAD formats are proprietary and unable to be
shared with non-CAD users. 3D publishing tools solve these problems and
deliver tools that enable fast creation of manuals, assembly
instructions, process instructions, and Web sites. Providing 3D data
and the applications to use it is key to integration of product
development, engineering, manu-facturing, and the supply chain. With
the advent of 3D publishing, the possibilities of repurposing 3D data
are phen-omenal. From research and development to manufacturing and
procurement to quality control and documentation to sales, marketing
and support, all areas of a company can benefit from using the same 3D
model. 3D publishing has also in-creased the use of 3D interactive
training manuals (IETMS). These manuals use 3D CAD models such that
assembly or maintenance procedures can quickly be seen, learned and
repeated as necessary.
Several companies, such as Lattice3D, nGrain, Quadrispace and
Right Hemisphere, have recently announced technologies that bring
usable 3D data into places it could never be properly used before. As
Dave Burdick, President of Collaborative Visions explains, "The market
for 3D publishing is approximately $500 million and growing rapidly. It
is currently characterized by a variety of ad-hoc tools used to capture
3D graphics and embed them into MS Office, Adobe PDF, and Web
documents. No dominant player has yet emerged but one of the leading
companies for what is called '3D publishing' is Lattice3D."
"Just as Adobe made 2D document viewing free with PDF but charged for
the Acrobat software that publishes 2D PDFs so Lattice3D has been a
leader in making 3D viewing "free", and CAD/PLM and Viewer software
companies are gradually following suit," Burdick added.
A proof point is that UGS recently produced a free JT viewer. The
advent of 'free' viewing will drive CAD and Viewer companies towards
the 3D Publishing Market where a new genre of solutions enable 3D data
to be repurposed for such things as interactive instruction and
training manuals, print manuals, documentation, online 3D parts
catalogues, Web sites that give users a 3D selecting or shopping
experience and more. Imagine a single accurate, up-to-date 3D data
model accessible from anywhere in the world, with geometric, design,
and business information easily accessible via a Web browser to not
only designers and engineers but also marketers, procurers, service
staff, partners, resellers, and customers. At first it seems a little
too obvious: the question begs, why wasn't this done years ago?
"The technology to release usable, intelligent 3D models from within a
proprietary CAD system simply didn't exist until a few years ago," said
Alexander Garcia-Tobar, CEO and president, Lattice3D. "The invention of
XML (eXtensible Markup Language) opened doors to a whole new world of
possibilities. One of those is XVL from Lattice3D. XVL suddenly allowed
intelligent 3D data to be used outside the CAD system in ways that
simply embody common-sense."
The 3D publishing industry is just beginning. New ideas, new
technology, and new needs all show the innovations of the design and
manufacturing industry. With shrinking budgets and increasing pressure
to get products to market sooner, managers are seriously looking at
finding ways to reduce costs and time-to-market. Appropriately,
com-panies are looking at using 3D pub-lishing for several
applications. Ultimately, that can only save money and time.
