Go to any trade show these days and you’re bound to run into a familiar scene, regardless of which software company is throwing the bash.
Vendor after vendor will be making a strong pitch that their add-on is the killer app that’ll make your product development process easier. While that’s a thread that runs through every show, it’s not the commonality I’m talking about.
The thing that struck me at a recent show was how many 3D PDF vendors are around these days.
Though the growth in 3D PDF suppliers has surprised me, it really shouldn’t have. Here’s why:
One of the only reasons people used to make 2D technical drawings (aside from the fact that some are gorgeous) was that they were the only way to transfer manufacturing information from a designer’s brain to the the people who’d actually make the parts.
But today, more companies are moving away from 2D drawings and have started to use model-based definition (MBD) to document how a part should be made. With MBD, drafters can attach all of the dimension, tolerancing, finishing and datum information directly to a model, eliminating the need for paper drawings. Or, as Timo Trautmann of PROSTEP stated, “MBE assumes that all information relevant to manufacturing and assembly can be represented in the 3D model correctly and in its entirety.”
If all of a model’s manufacturing information could be attached to a model, then it only makes sense to skip the cost of printing out drawings and move to an all-digital drawing format that preserves what’s best in 3D models—the fact that they’re 3D.
Manufacturers are beginning to agree.
So, it comes as no surprise that PROSTEP has decided to upgrade its PDF Generator 3D to capture more of the ever-growing MBD user base.
Its latest release of PDF Generator 3D includes options for changing the color of product and manufacturing information, making it much easier to isolate from the background of the PDF document. Additionally, the transfer of product marketing information (PMI) data from software like Creo, SOLIDWORKS, CATIA v5, NX and JT into a 3D PDF format has been accelerated compared to the native 3D PDF export functions found within those packages.