Amar Hanspal Vice President Autodesk Collaboration Services

At first blush, Adobe’s recent release of Adobe® Acrobat® 3D appears to encroach on Autodesk’s territory. The Autodesk® family of DWF™ (Design Web Format) products allow designers and engineers to package and share 3D content with others who have a need to see it. Acrobat 3D is being actively marketed with the same intent.

We asked Amar Hanspal, vice president of Autodesk Collaboration Services, to comment on Adobe’s new product and how it differs from Autodesk DWF.

HotNews: What are the major differences between Acrobat 3D and DWF?

Hanspal: I can tell you about the philosophical differences between the approaches of the two companies. Overall, Adobe has a generalist approach and we have a specialist approach. Because we are specialists, we focus on the markets we are working in such as manufacturing, architecture, civil engineering, and so on. When we create technology for these markets we make it very specific to ensure it will work in those industries.

Our commitment to those specific markets translates to the way the technology works. You will see differences between the two products in format, in precision, in compression, in the completeness of the information that gets transported. Adobe might use as examples such things as transmitting technical documentation or manuals and so forth. But we are concerned about making sure that what goes downstream can be used by someone to actually manufacture—that the information is precise enough to allow someone to take measurements, that it’s precise enough to allow people to make suggestions on thickness and thinness, and so on. That’s one major difference in the two approaches.

HotNews: Are there other major differences?

Hanspal: Yes. Actually everything they are offering in Acrobat 3D is available for free with DWF. Adobe is charging about $1,000 for this package to create the 3D files and embed them in Acrobat. Publishing and viewing with DWF is free. So another philosophical difference between Autodesk and Adobe is that they believe that people need to pay to create these documents while we believe that people should get this capability along with the engineering software they are using.

There is another difference, and it is subtle, but we see products like our DWF Composer as a bidirectional environment. We look at the entire engineering workflow and realize that it doesn’t stop with the ability to publish and distribute documents. Documents are published for a purpose. We ensure that when documents are published and someone views them using DWF, that when they come back those changes or suggestions are overlaid on top of the engineering information. It’s an entire workflow that also connects with Autodesk Vault or with Autodesk ProductStream. The data moves through all of these pieces—it isn’t just a publish-and-distribute model. The customer is trying to drive an improvement across the entire chain of people, not just a point-to-point kind of improvement. That’s the other thing that is quite different in our approach.

HotNews: How does DWF address current industry trends?

Hanspal: Customer interest in having this capability has been increasing. For example, manufacturing professionals have wanted to share information in their native 3D format with people for a long time now. Their interest is increasing because there are more and more suppliers involved in the manufacture of products.

There are several levels of collaboration involved here. The most basic level is to view the information using our DWF Viewer. The next level up is a collaborative design session with the people that view these 3D files. Sometimes, people want to do this session synchronously where everyone shows up at a teleconference or virtual meeting and makes suggestions. But most people want to do it asynchronously where the designer distributes the document downstream and then invites suggestions. That is what we enable with DWF.

The highest level involves digital mockup, where people interactively put things together such as receiving an automobile part design, for example, to see if it fits with the chassis of the automobile body. Right now, that’s a very small percentage of the usage.

HotNews: And you see movement and increased interest across all of those levels?

Hanspal: Yes. And there are market drivers, too, in both building and manufacturing that are forcing the extension of the design content to project team members. In manufacturing, the goal is to get products to market faster. In building design, they want to get building projects done more quickly and on budget. This whole process is shaving days off the design life cycle.

Another issue is outsourcing. Very often, you aren’t working with people from your own company. This increases the need to come up with information that is easy to share, but that doesn’t violate the whole security and intellectual property requirements of your own company. That’s another business driver we are seeing.

For more information on the Autodesk DWF family of products, visit www.autodesk.com.