Imagine one day, a customer asks you for a CAD file of a design you are working on, but you don’t want them to be able to measure it. What could you do? If you send them CAD data they will be able to measure it. Then another day, your marketing team wants to render a design you are working on, but they don’t want to see all of the details in your model. You could remove all the details in your CAD model but that would take up valuable time. Do these stories sound familiar? If so, you might want to consider using a Lightweight 3D format to share design information.

First, the question needs to be asked, what exactly is a Lightweight 3D format? Basically, it is a format for sharing design information that has the following qualities:

1. It can be easily shared
2. It can be easily viewed
3. It contains 3D geometric information
4. It does not contain any parametric design information
5. It can be generated from almost any CAD format
6. It can be used in animations
7. It can be used in renderings
8. It can be used for technical illustrations

Note that standard CAD formats are great for designing but have many limitations when it comes to information exchange, for example they can’t always be easily shared and viewed. Lightweight 3D formats were developed to overcome these limitations and thus enabling collaboration.

Let’s say you decide to use a Lightweight format to share data then the question becomes which Lightweight format would you use? There are several options, below is a list of some of the most popular choices available.

eDrawings

It is interesting to note that eDrawings was one of the first Lightweight 3D formats to be developed. Although it was originally developed for SolidWorks, there are now versions that work with all the leading CAD packages. A great feature of eDrawings is that you do not need a viewer to open an eDrawings file, since it allows you to create HTML files (containing the 3D data) that can be opened in Internet Explorer. These files are also very compact, can be marked up electronically by you or your customer and can be easily shared via e-mail.

3D PDF

PDF has become a very popular format for sharing 2D drawing data and text documents as well. The free and ubiquitous viewer (Adobe Reader) and its compact file size give PDF a unique advantage over other formats. As if that weren’t enough Adobe upped the ante a couple years ago and added 3D capabilities to the PDF format. You might be wondering how do you create a 3D PDF file in the first place? There are a couple ways to achieve this. One way would be to use the latest version of Adobe Acrobat Pro Extended, which has the ability to import the most popular CAD formats, and then use it to generate 3D PDF files. Another way would be to create 3D PDF files right from your CAD software. Although currently, not all CAD software has the ability to create 3D PDF files (both SolidWorks and 3DVIA Composer can do this right now), it is expected that this will become common in the near future.

JT

The JT format was developed by UGS. At first look JT appears to be simply UGS’s version of eDrawings. However, although JT and eDrawings are similar in many ways, one of the main goals of JT is to become a key component of PLM systems. This fits UGS’s business model of focusing on PLM and on large companies. Also, unlike their competitors, UGS has created an Open Collaboration program for integrators in order to expand the use of JT and JT enabled applications throughout the market. For more information please visit this site.

In conclusion, it must be noted that designers and engineers are not the only ones that need to use CAD data. For every designer that uses CAD data there are people in QA, Purchasing, Marketing, and customers that need to see this information. The only difference is that these users do not need to access all the information that is included in the CAD data.  In most cases all they need to see is what is available in Lightweight 3D formats.

- by Joseph Vera (written in December 2008)