3D Studio Max to Acrobat

Hi Dean,
3D toolkit (Acrobat 3D v 8) is basicly the same as the 3D reviewer in Acrobat 9 pe, but with different features.
To explain the 3ds to pdf workflow, I created a tutorial blog:

http://3dpdf.blogspot.com/

There are still some things missing which i have to sort out, but this will take some time, because regarding javascript, im noob too :)

I hope it helps,
Chuck

Chuck, Thanks for the reply.

However, I have V9. Reviewer is a sad, sad replacement to 3d Toolkit. Toolkit had many materials built in. You could place bitmaps in the materials. Reviewer has a very poor selection for materials. You can change color and specularity. What do I do if I want to make a wood texture, or a brushed metal? I can't.

Any suggestions other than spending $1500 of Deep Exploration. What ticks me off, is that deep Exp. was in v8 as the toolkit. Way to take a step back, Adobe!

What are my options?

Dean

You should be able to get your meshes directly from Max to APEX without needing to re-apply materials in Toolbox, but it depends on a few things being right.

Bitmaps in Max can be anywhere on your system and the 'path' stored in the exported files is often relative (or even relative to Max, not the mesh file). APEX can't cope with a bitmap path which says "./sceneassets/images/brick.png".

The first thing to do is place all the bitmaps in the same folder as the MAX file and remove the path data from the material (if the bitmap and MAX file are in the same place, there's no path stored). Max has a helper in the utilities panel to help collect all your assets into one place. Then make sure nothing in your scene is beyond the capabilities of U3D (the format APEX stores in) - so no non-square UV mapping, animated colors, anisotropic reflections, SSS, etc. and only simple omni point lights (no sky systems or lights with gobos).

Finally, try exporting the scene as ASCII (.ASE) or OBJ if the .3DS version won't import properly - there's still things about .3DS (non-mesh surfaces, translated pivots) which APEX can't handle, but they're "burned out" by exporting to a dumber file type. Remember to save the exported file in the same folder as all your bitmaps, so the file references still work.

OK...this may sound really dumb. What is APEX?

Sorry - APEX = Acrobat Pro EXtended

Ahhhh...thanks! I will give your suggestions a try.

Dean

Did that happen to work? Other than deep exploration I haven't seen any other commercial products to convert 3ds files to pdf files. I'm sure something else exists but you'd probably end up finding some alpha stage tool on sourceforge that won't really meet your needs. I would've expected swift3d to have a tool perhaps in their 3ds max plugin that converts 3ds files to vector flash models. Unfortunately it does not from what I can see.