Every vote counts!

First i want to thank the 20 voters who participated the poll.
Back in November last year i took a screenshot of the voting results according the reliabilty of 3Dpdf. By the time the voting results have somehow changed, which is the reason for this entry.



Now the poll is not representative, but confirms my guess that majority of users can access 3D data provided by pdf, which I might add is a huge success by Adobe.


I don't intend to write further tutorials, as the main aspects 3Dpdf's 3D capabilities (in my opnion) are already covered.
If you disagree or got questions about issues related to 3ds max and pdf, you can either leave a comment or contact me by email.

Flashed 3D

Interactive Flash content as Texture Map on 3D objects?
Yes, see how it works in the following marvellous two video tutorials
by Dave Merchant on Acrobatusers.com

Part 1

Part 2

Tech Trouble?

Due to recent feedback I decided to remove the html embedded 3Dpdf examples, because of browser compatibility problems. If you also get problems following a 3D pdf link, click the right mouse button on the link, then "save target as", and open the pdf document with Adobe Reader.
A proper working 3D acceleration is essential for viewing 3D pdf's (Direct 3D on windows, OpenGL on Linux and Mac), which means that not everyone can see 3D as the header of this blog says.

So if you have problems viewing 3D pdf's take the following steps:

- Make sure you have a 3D graphics card with more than 64mb video memory (more is better)
- Make sure the latest graphics card drivers are installed
- For Windows users: Make sure Direct 3D is working (go on Start --> Run --> enter dxdiag --> Display --> test Direct 3D)
get Directx here if it's not installed
- Make sure you have the latest version of Adobe Reader installed

Speed Up

Flatiron is a plugin (found under utilities after installation) that simplifies the flattening process for texture baking. Its main advantages over the 3ds max standard flattening tool are a more efficient usage of texture space, real pixel based spacing between polygon clusters and creating less amounts of clusters by better unfolding. With 249,- € it is more adressed to people who are regularly doing texture baking.
From the same people comes UV Packer as an "alternative" solution for 79,- €, which only does the packing procedure. This means that you would have to use the 3ds max standard flattening tool to create the clusters first, and then you would have to apply the UV Packer modifier for a more efficient placement of the clusters. With both solutions you can optimize the the texture space usage afterwards by hand using the UVW Unwrap modifier. Keep in mind you still should only merge objects with compareable scaling to one Mesh for baking them together on one baked texture.
Both plugins are available as demo with some restrictions.

Opacity Bug II - Material Blending

It is possible to fake material blending using opacity maps on separate meshes to some extend. This technique comes handy if you would like to blend materials with different reflection, bump or specular highlight properties.




As you can see in the 3Dpdf you can download here, the opacity is pretty kinky when it comes to overlaying semi transparent layers (backside). I have no general solution, because the circumstances under which the opacity begins to bug may vary, and I did not fully understand its behaviour yet.
So here a few tips how you could bypass this problem:

- flip the normals of the top layer (requires double sided rendering, no specular highlight is possible)
- detach surfaces (with different directions) to separate objects
- attach surfaces that don't work well, despite flipping or detaching, to a newly created object and delete the element of the object you attached the surface to (this also works if your specular highlights don't work, but your normals are showing in the desired direction)

Your solution might be one, some or all of these points, but it requires sometimes some trial and error.


I used this method to create window frames in my TGV Lyon Scene (Filesize 10mb / 256mb video memory).

The bandwidth is kindly offered by: active-servers


Edit:
If you wish to combine transparancy, bump map and reflection map you cannot use tiff with alpha channel, instead of that use separate jpg's (don't forget to uncheck ICC Profile in Photoshop).

Optimisations II - Scaling - Precision

The experience of a 3D pdf depends strongly on its performance in fps. To make sure the scene runs fine on lower spec systems, I used the good old nvidia Geforce TI4200/64mb as reference, which runs scenes up to 130.000 polygons fine. The texture size for baked images on this card should be 1024x1024, and it can handle up to 12 of them (and maybe more).
Newer graphics cards from the Geforce 8 series on, runs the same amount of images at 2048x2048 with acceptable fps. Importing scenes in several steps (biggest objects first), by using the 3D Toolkit to merge your objects, can prevent heavy performance problems too. Additionally you can improve performance by lowering Values at importing in the "optimize" tab (Acrobat 9), or using the 3D toolkit (Acrobat 8). I personally prefer the 3D Toolkit method, because it gives you a high quality sample, which you can reduce to more compressed versions incrementally. To do so, right click inside Acrobat on your 3D scene (Annotation) and choose "edit in 3D toolkit". In 3D Toolkit change an unimportant value (like scene material specular highlight) and exit the toolkit by closing the window. Because of the change of a value, the 3D toolkit has a reason to ask you to save the changes on exit.

The Game and the CAD button define presets for the mesh compression. The Game button does a good job in most cases. A further reduction of mesh accuracy does not deliver significant changes regarding the filesize and 3D performance, but may cause visible errors. Additionally you can reduce the file size by lowering the JPG compression value. The more grainy your Texture Maps are, the more you can reduce that value. The more gradient the higher should be this value. Keep in mind that Texture Maps with alpha channel (tiff, png, tga) are not considered by the Texture Compression.

Update:
Acrobat users, using Deep Exploration to get their objects into pdf will have the same Export Dialog as in 3D Toolkit, and maybe some more possibilities for optimisations, but at this moment I can't go more deeply into that, because I don't have Deep Exploration yet to figure out.
Finally you can reduce the file size additionally by using the pdf optimizer for saving your pdf.

What it actually does, is it removes unused resources that sometimes blow up the file size of your pdf, and compresses the poster image of your 3D Annotation by the given compression rate.

Acrobat 9

Acrobat 9 brings some changes that makes it harder to make textured objects work inside pdf.
On the other hand it has some nice new features like text and graphics over 3D background, even semi transparent ones, that gives you complete new possibilities on creating interfaces for interacting with your objects.

Major worsenings from Acrobat 8 to Acrobat 9:
-no .ase filesupport
-no .rh filesupport
-3D Toolkit (Deep Exploration "light") replaced by 3D Reviewer (homegrown 3D Toolkit without texture support)

Workaround:
1. Export your 3ds max scenes/objects as .rh (Right Hemisphere)
2. Open the file in Right Hemisphere's Deep Exploration, and save it as .u3d file
3. Import the .u3d file into Acrobat 9