Saturday, August 02, 2008

Blender to Acrobat 3D


A co-worked was talking about Acrobat 3d yesterday. It sounded cool so I had to try it!

The first thing I found out was Acrobat imports the Universal 3D (U3D) format. Looking at my export options in Blender, I did not see an option for that. So a quick Google brought me to the open source MeshLab. With MeshLab I was able to export the BLEND to OBJ and then convert U3D. That worked on a simple model (a cube with a UV), but crashed repeatedly when I tried a more complicated model.

Searching further, I found out the free (but not open source) DAZ Studio exported U3D. I use DAZ and I like it. So I brought my OBJ into DAZ (no problem) and exported the U3D. DAZ exported a large file very fast!

Then I went into Acrobat Profession 8, opened a document, went to Tool=>Advanced Editing=>3D Tool. With the 3D Tool, draw a box into which you will import your U3D.

You can see a quick test of the Blender Basics mouse in Acrobat here. I didn't do any tweaking to the lighting or materials after bringing it into DAZ via the OBJ format, it is just a straight import/export with no finessing: Blender=>OBJ=>DAZ=>U3D=>Acrobat.

5 comments:

  1. I also have been experiment with acrobat 3d using blender and photoshop 3D but I can not get a solid view of my model when creating the pdf3d-file even when I set solid view on rendering form, instead I get a transparent material, or a wireframe model Can you tell me how to get solid view

    surfsk8.jare@gmail.com

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  2. Did you follow the same steps as in my post above?

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  3. Meshlab worked for me. It's not pretty but you can do it without Acrobat Pro. Meshlab will export the UD3 file with a simple Latex script which you can use pdflatex on. The only problem I had is when I tried to change the default orientation (which was odd) I get a divide by 0 error from pdflatex.

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  4. I think that this i really cool, but i cant figure out how to put the material and colour on my model. not in meshlab, and not in DAZ. How did you do?

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