That's 2: Hitachi Expresses Support for U3D

With everyone and his pet gerbil flogging "open" 3D formats, Intel has signed up one more high-profile vendor to support its U3D (short for "universal three dimenions") format. Adobe was the first; Hitachi is now another.

To celebrate the event, Hitachi has a whitepaper describing U3D's benefits to CAD: The Impact of U3D on Product Lifecycle Management. The whitepaper is in PDF format, incorporates U3D images, and requires Acrobat Reader v7.

What do we learn from the whitepaper?

* PDF files with embedded U3D images are really big. This 12-page document is just over 10MB; saving the file in DOC format (to strip out the U3D code) reduces the filesize to just over 1MB.

* PDF files with embedded U3D images are sluggish. Click on a U3D image, and it takes 4 seconds for the toolbar to appear. Paging through the document isn't lightning fast, as with usual PDF files. Alt+Tab task-switching is slow. (There is an option to disable 3D, which speeds things up considerably.)

Clearly, optimization is needed somewhere in the Java code that runs the images.

On the positive side, the U3D images handle the following:

* Regular and exploded views.
* Switching between line and shaded views.
* Predefined views, as well as zoom and pna.

(At this point in working with the U3D PDF document, Acrobat Pro 7 crashed.)

* Change lighting.
* Run and stop animation, and walkthroughs.
* And the PDF files are semi-backwards-compatible. I was able to open the document in Acrobat Reader 5; all the text was there. Curiously, one of the U3D images displayed, and the others did not.

"In essence, 3D provides a universal language that even transcends what pictures, schematics, drawings, blueprints and other 2D media can convey," says the whitepaper. "In this new U3D world, every web site and electronic document will contain some U3D content." Missing, however, is any discussion of how the CAD model gets into U3D format.

Update

On a discussion group, users noticed that PDF-with-U3D is very slow -- unless your computer runs at 3GHz or faster.

Comments

[Mike McSween]

My experience is contrary to that above. I am running on a 1.8GHz machine and PDF files with U3D are smooth on my machine. I have a good ATI 128MB graphics card that does a good job with Direct3D - perhaps that is th difference.

Also, I output one floor of a building I am working on complete with furniture and placed in the middle of a page full of text and the resultant 3D PDF file is less than 400k.

See http://www.bentley.com/en-US/Products/MicroStation/Interactive+3D+PDF.htm for more 3D PDF sample produced from MicroStation.