A sales person is wondering if they can send a 3D PDF to a potential customer and be rest assured it can not be re-engineered. Is there a way of making sure that can't happen?
Thanks,
Bill
A sales person is wondering if they can send a 3D PDF to a potential customer and be rest assured it can not be re-engineered. Is there a way of making sure that can't happen?
Thanks,
Bill
Well the 3d model would be to scale, but it can only be imported into SolidWorks if the computer opening it also has Adobe Illustrator CS3 or later. Then I couldn't tell you if SolidWorks would be able to back out the model. I would think that an assembly would be near impossible to reverse engineer, or any part with multi-bodies with internal parts not visible from outside of the part. The part can also be defeatured to just show enough to the customer to understand the form and function without seeing every little detail. The company I work for would still get the customer to sign a non-disclosure agreement first.
edrawings is better for that.
One can measure in e-drawings but not in 3d PDF.
True, but you can disable that when you create the edrawing from Solidworks
Thanks John. I have already suggested using e-Drawings but for a few different reasons they were looking at other methods.
Thanks to all that replied. I just sent an email to our VAR and will let you know what I get back in from them. I am also going to do some tesitng with file size and performance between a 3D PDF and e-Drawings. I am assuming the e-Drawings would be bigger since it would need to be an EXE with the embedded viewer.
I will update this post when with my findings.
Thanks again!
The customer can download the free e-drawing viewer from SolidWorks and then the file size does not need to include the embedded viewer software each time.
Thanks Jeff,
We entertained that as well. We are trying to make it as easy for the customer as possible. Downloading software is another step along with dealing with IT rules and what not. These are potential customers so they may never need e-Drawings again. Getting them a file they can click and go vs. having to install special software is the preferred method. File size should not be an issue anyway. Performance would be a bigger factor. I know that in the past an e-Drawing of an assembly consisting of thousands of components can get pretty clunky. Have not tried for awhile but will today. The 3D PDF is a simple interface as well. Not that e-Drawings is all the difficulty but if customer does not have SolidWorks or never used e-Drawings it is one more thing for them to figure out. If we need them to be able to explode, hide, etc. then e-Drawings will defiantly be the way to go. For an inital concept for the potential customer a PDF may be better.
Or save the edrawing as an html file so it launches in internet explorer.
You could save the assembly as a part, selecting exterior faces or components, then save that part as a 3D PDF, you'd then have eliminated a lot of the engineering.
Thanks again to all. After looking at it a little closer I am going to push them to use e-drawings.
I thought there was an option to save it as an exe right from SW. The only way I can figure out is to save it out as na edrawing and then open it and save it as an exe.
Hi Bill,
I realise this conversation was a while ago but I'm interested as to why you're going to push your sales people to use e-drawings and what the situation is like for you now?
I assumed that PDF would be a safer method, as Deepak mentions above measuring isn't possible with the PDF so is this not the better option for you to use?
I'm having the same problem with sales at the moment and to be honest have only just discovered that 3D PDFs are a possibility after researching embedding the models into websites... PDF would be so much easier for us instead of trying to explain to everyone that they need to download a copy of edrawings.
I appreciate any advice/information you have.
Thanks.
Hi Deepak,
I'd already read that but thank you.
I don't have a problem with how to create a 3D PDF but wanted to know more about sending a 3D PDF vs an edrawings file - I couldn't find a discussion other than this one regarding that subject.
I mean if you still want to send a 3d PDF but not edrawing and still want to include the dimensions, then you can insert a 3d view into the 2d PDF which will have the option to rotate. zoom, etc within the 2d PDF. Sorry if I was not clear earlier.
Sorry it's probably me not being clear! I know that I can do that but still confused as to why Bill chose the edrawings format, that was my main question.
Thanks for your help.
The answer should be straight forward: edrawings offer much more values then a 3d PDF. For e.g. measure, section, animation (yes you can play your animation in edrawings),
I don't know if it's a new feature in the latest 3D PDF but I have just created one & am able to measure very acurately & play an animation if my model had one.
Not sure as it had been a long time since I deal with 3d PDFs as I'm more happy using edrawings.
Let me try it out and this is going to be cool
The answer isn't so straightforward when, like other people, we have clients who don't want to download additional software - PDF makes this much easier. Also I'm not too bothered about clients being able to animate,section and measure - the technical drawings we send out contain all the relevant information. A lot of our customers simply want a model they can spin around and see from all angles.
From Bill's original post he was concerned about clients being able to extract information from the PDF, then later went on to say that due to ease of use he felt PDF was the way to go. I'm assuming it is harder to extract information from a PDF rather than edrawings but I can't see that anyone has answered this question...
Agree with what you've said. You can use the exe option from the edrawings which doesn't need anyone to download the edrawings. I'm not sure if there is a way other than measuring in the PDF file to extract the information.
Bill & Gemma,
I thoroughly understand your point of view, sharing a 3D model to a customer, where customer should not be able to re-engineer it & is 3D PDF the right choice ?
Even we share 3D PDF with our customers, but it tends to become a huge file (some times as per the complexity, it reaches above 1GB) which is not convenient to share & nor it could be easily opened on customer's low RAM systems, so we have to ask them to get E-drawing viewer.
3D PDF could be measured & thus your customer could re-engineer it, just that he needs to have a right ratio, like 1 model unit (pdf) = 39.38 inch
(spelling of "Ratio" is wrong, but that is Adobe's problem)
Just in case if you don't know where to get the above in Adobe reader.
1) Go to "Edit" in Menu bar & under "Analysis" select "Measuring Tool"
2) As soon as you see following tool bar
3) Right click in the 3D model display area and following menu appears
4) And select "Define Model Units" to get that small unit conversion window
Similarly you can have for "mm"
So even in my belief E-drawing is a better option
Sorry for the long message, but I love to post such details, in case if I forget & need to recollect or share with my colleagues & friends
Cheers ! ! !
Poorvesh, thank you SO much for your response, it's great to finally have an answer to my question after wondering for so long!
Brilliant information and very helpful.
Think we might also stick with eDrawings. Thanks again.
edrawings is better for that.