On my system it crashes but before doing so it created the u3d file object3D.u3d. It creates a latex file as well, but that didn't work for me, so I wrote a new one: pdf3d.tex.
If you want to change the intermediate filename from object3D.u3d to something else, you have to adapt it in the latex file pdf3d.tex as well.
the best imo it would be to have a script to export a FC solid model to U3D or better PRC and then run Asymptote (fully open source) to generate the 3D pdf... but unfortunately nothing has been developed on this side atm...
Direct export would be great. I was surprised that there are not many viewers out there, which can display one of the standard (or better: de-facto-standard) formats like STEP, STL, or OBJ or alike.
When I recently discovered 3DPDF I thought it was the end of the "Show and Tell" problems, because the Acrobat reader is widely used. But here we have the problem that it is difficult to generate the target format. So there seems to be not much desire to only view 3D files.
Impressive! Unfortunately I know of no way to view 3D PDFs on Ubuntu. It looks like there is no more Linux version available of Adobe Reader, there's only an Android one.
NormandC wrote:Impressive! Unfortunately I know of no way to view 3D PDFs on Ubuntu. It looks like there is no more Linux version available of Adobe Reader, there's only an Android one.
+1, AFAIK there is no software on Linux which can handle 3D pdf. We use it widely at work because any Customer has an AdobeReader but lot's do not know about ifc (building model format) and do not have an viewer for this file format. This will change but at the moment 3Dpdf is still mostly used.
Impressive! Unfortunately I know of no way to view 3D PDFs on Ubuntu. It looks like there is no more Linux version available of Adobe Reader, there's only an Android one.
I found an old version which I was able to install, but of course I would like to have an open software displaying 3D PDF.
With mathgl it is also possible to create directly 3d pdf files and it is supposed to support a certain mesh format. So, when writing out a mesh in FreeCAD in this format it theoretically should be possible to create a 3d pdf file without the need of pdflatex or the idtf converter. Unfortunately, after trying several hours I couldn't get it to work.
Another very promising alternative is the library libPRC. This way you can write out a mesh in the prc format (which is the successor of the deprecated u3d format) and then using the libharu library the prc file can be embedded into a pdf file.
wmayer wrote: ↑Thu Aug 10, 2017 8:22 pm
With mathgl it is also possible to create directly 3d pdf files and it is supposed to support a certain mesh format. So, when writing out a mesh in FreeCAD in this format it theoretically should be possible to create a 3d pdf file without the need of pdflatex or the idtf converter. Unfortunately, after trying several hours I couldn't get it to work.
Another very promising alternative is the library libPRC. This way you can write out a mesh in the prc format (which is the successor of the deprecated u3d format) and then using the libharu library the prc file can be embedded into a pdf file.
Have you succeed with libPRC and libharu? Not a must but an other nice feature to have an option to export FC file to 3dpdf ...
