The 3D Pub

Watch this very informative webinar on Share3D PDF. This serves as a great getting started tutorial as well as a thorough introduction to the product.

Novedge Webinar Series Episode 29: Creating interactive 3D PDF Documents with Share3D PDF from Novedge on Vimeo.

Just a quick note to let our blog readers know that our new entry product for creating 3D PDF files from 3D models has been released.

For just $99, Share3D PDF users can leverage the following

• Import 3D files such as SolidWorks, Inventor, Rhino, SketchUp, and much more
• Rapidly capture 3D views and recall them with PDF bookmarks
• Preview and publish to more than 50 high-impact templates
• Click to easily customize text, images, logos and colors
• Many templates include interactive buttons and clickable lists
• Assign names and descriptions to captured views that will display in the PDF
• Share 3D with anyone that has Adobe(R) Reader 9+

For a more detailed discussion and a free trial, check out the website: http://www.share3d.com.

Join us on Tuesday, October 19th for a quick demonstration of Publisher3D.  Learn all about using Publisher3D to create illustrations and animations; learn what’s new in 2011 and learn how to benefit using our time-saving tools such as Smart Template Technology, Seamless document updates and large project management tools.

Sing up here:

https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/893712289

We will also have a similar webinar introducing Pages3D 2011 in the near future.

Smart Template Technology (STT) is a very important technology for QuadriSpace users and provides an incredible jump start to many historically tedious documentation tasks. This blog post will provide a short overview of this important technology so that you can use it on your next project. Although this was introduce in our 2009 version with Service Pack 2, many customers are still unaware of the power of this important capability.

Smart Template Technology is the key to 15 minutes animations, like this! Without STT, after creating an exploded view, each view would have to be created manually.

In the previous example, we created an animation of an assembly process. The user steps were to (1) create an exploded view, (2) setup a “template image” (3) use the Storyboard Wizard (based on STT) to generate views and (4) tweak the resulting views. To most users, the unknown part of this is step (3) which automatically creates views. How does this work?

Smart Template Technology - Click to zoom

So, as a user of Publisher3D or Pages3D, there are a few things that you should seek to accomplish at each step diagrammed above.

(Estimated time in animation example – 7 minutes)

Creating an exploded view is the first step. The strategy here is to create an exploded view that has steps in the correct order. If you are creating an assembly process, then the steps can be in the opposite order because there  is an option to “Reverse Steps” during when using the Storyboard Wizard. You can review and adjust the order of the steps by using the “Exploded View Panel” (shown in the graphic above).

Another thing to consider here is that you can allow parts to overlap physically. There is a Storyboard Wizard option to hide the parts until they are needed. This can result in better generated images. In standard exploded views, parts can be significantly distant because other parts are in between. In animation (especially an assemble process) animation, all of the parts may never be visible together in an exploded state.

(Estimated time in animation example – 3 minutes)

An image template is really just a fancy way of saying set up the view in Publisher3D. After you create the exploded view, it is important to get the view set up the way you want it BEFORE running the Storyboard Wizard. This is because the settings that you make to the view will propagate through all illustrations that are created. This includes setting a viewpoint, the desired render style, a ground plane, shadows, reflections and any other view property that you want all generated illustrations to have. Keep in mind that this can be tweaked after the illustrations are generated too.

(Estimate time in animation example – 1 minute)

This is a simple step. Simply activate the “Storyboard Wizard” command and STT will do most of the rest for you. There are a few options that you can select during the wizard that will determine the results you get. For example, when we created the assembly process, we made sure to select the “Reverse Steps” option so that our automatically created illustrations would end up in the correct order.

(Estimated time in animation example – 4 minutes)

This is the result. After this is created, you are free to modify each individual illustration, change the transitions between illustrations (for assembly I like “Accel 2 Reverse”), change viewpoints, change render styles per illustration, add markups, add meta data to each illustration, etc.

There are many things that can be done with a storyboard in QuadriSpace products. The example so far just shows a simple and rapidly created animation that was published as an AVI for uploading to YouTube.

What’s Next?

In a blog soon, I will expand on this Power Supply project to (1) add metadata to each illustration and publish a set of images to Word and then (2) begin working with this storyboard in Pages3D to show how the storyboard can be reused to create interactive 3D documents or rapidly add images to pages in a document.

Last week I wrote a quick blog entry on using QuadriSpace Publisher3D to create an animation from a Power Supply designed with SolidWorks. The creation of the animation took 15 minutes to create including the creation of an exploded view the rapid use of Smart Template Technology to create keyframes and then a quick tweaking of the resulting keyframes. This article can be found here.

Here is the video:

Working on examples for our 2011 release…

Today’s project is to create an assembly animation from a SolidWorks model of a power supply. There are really just 3 steps using QuadriSpace Publisher3D to accomplish this and I will go through each of them in a little detail.

Step 1: Create an Exploded View

First, create an exploded view. Optionally you could use an exploded view imported from SolidWorks, but for this examples, we will create one inside Publisher3D.

In general, this is not the same as a standard exploded view because when you are done parts may overlap some because when we create the animation, they will be hidden and shown as the step-by-step process progresses.  Also the order of the exploded steps is important because in our second step we will make use of this order. Here is the exploded view I came up with:

The rest of this blog posting will discuss commands that start from the “Illustrate” ribbon.  Below is a partial view of the Illustrate ribbon in Publisher3D 2011… take specific note of the “Illustrations” tools and the “Storyboard” tools. Here it is:

Step 2: Automatically Generate a Set of Illustrations

Second, use Smart Template Technology(TM) to generate a series of illustrations based on your exploded view. When the illustrations are generated, the current render style and viewing position will be used for all, so you may want to tweak these properties beforehand. You will find the command “Storyboard Wizard” under the Storyboard pull-down. We pick our newly created exploded view and  it automatically creates a storyboard like this:

Step 3: Make Adjustments to the Illustrations

And finally, tweak each illustration as needed and add markups as desired. For this simple example, I just modified a few viewpoints to better match the action. We can discuss adding markups to each scene at a different time. Another tweak I made was to select a different transistion between each illustration, this was done by right-clicking the transition on the storyboard. I don’t really like when the parts move at the same time that the camera moves, so I selected a transition that moved the parts first, then positioned the camera.

The Storyboard of Illustrations is now ready to be published, so I selected the Publish ribbon and then chose “Movie > Storyboard > Publish Now!”

I’ll post the video to YouTube next week.

We are putting the final touches on our next major release. This is an important release that includes tons of user requested (and inspired) updates.

First, what was the inspiration? Well, our customers are focused on getting better documents and graphics created faster by leveraging as much of the 3D CAD information as possible. So, our focus was on upgrades to the user interface that would make the product more intuitive and easy to use, tools that would make document creators lives easier and improvements to the quality of published outputs.

Pages3D 2011

I am working on a few example documents to highlights some of the 2011 capabilities and I will post some of these and share thoughts and screenshots as I go along. For starters, here is a screenshot of an iPhone4 example I am working on with Pages3D. I’m still not sure whether I’ll go in a printed or interactive direction but here is a quick screenshot of a draft version. I found a very well-done 3D model of the iPhone4 for on the internet in SolidWorks format.

Some of the upgrades in 2011 you can expect for Pages3D include a new material ribbon (shown above) with an included library of high-quality materials; linked text boxes that allow text from one page to flow seamlessly across pages of your document; rendering upgrades that include real-time shadows, per-pixel lighting and real-time reflections.

Publisher3D 2011

Another example that I am working on is a set of illustrations in Publisher3D. I will likely publish these to both images and as a animation when all is done, but for now here is a pic captured from our 2011 edition of Publisher3D. Current users will notice some changes to the Illustrate ribbon… all for the better. Don’t worry, the interface is still 99.9% the same, some icons are modified, some buttons are rearranged and we replaced the confusing word “topic” with “storyboard”… it makes a lot more sense to use a storyboard to create an animations than a topic to most users and our customers pointed us in the right direction.

There will be alot more to this example when I’m done.For one thing, the sequence of steps that you see hinted at in the storyboard at the bottom were created using Smart Template Technology(tm) meaning that an exploded view that was created in SolidWorks (in this case) was used as the starting point and multiple illustrations were captured automatically to create editable keyframes of each step of the assembly process.

I’ll blog on Smart Template Technology in more detail as I get to it.

Stay Tuned!