Cadalyst - December 2007 - (Page 18)

cadlabsreview Top Honors Saluting Outstanding CAD Products By Ron LaFon Cadalyst All-Star awards honor the best of the best — the most outstanding among all software and hardware products that earned Highly Recommended ratings from Cadalyst Labs in the past six months. Not all Cadalyst reviews are published in the print issue, and some of the product reviews in this article appeared in the Cadalyst Daily e-mail newsletter. Beginning in 2008, Cadalyst will bestow its All-Star awards annually rather than every six months. Software Adobe Systems • Acrobat 3D v8 • www.adobe.com September 2007. Adobe released the second major version of Acrobat 3D, and I noted in my review that this major design and collaboration application has a lot of tools that are both powerful and easy to use. And they’re all based on the ubiquitous, user-friendly PDF file format. To the feature set found in Acrobat 8 Professional, Acrobat 3D adds the ability to convert 3D designs from major CAD applications to PDF, as well as create rich documents that can include exploded views, animations, lighting, materials, textures, and color. It also can export precise geometry from PDF to STEP, IGES, and Parasolid to enable downstream use in CAD, CAM, and CAE applications. Adobe has continued to forge alliances with major players in the CAD and engineering software community, and new announcements appear regularly. As a result of these alliances and technology acquisitions, Adobe Acrobat 3D works with a wide array of industry-standard software. Adobe Systems • Photoshop CS3 Extended • www.adobe.com September 2007. Considered by many to be one of the premiere applications of our time, Adobe’s new version of Photoshop has features geared toward technical users. 18 December 2007 | cadalyst | www.cadalyst.com Photoshop has long been an extremely useful application for design professionals in the visualization and digital content creation (DCC) pursuits, but the addition of support for 3D and the ability to obtain quantitative as well as qualitative data from images adds great depth to the product. With its additional integration with Adobe Lightroom and superb facility with digital images, Adobe Photoshop CS3 Extended is an exceptional application that can be very useful tool for design professionals. An Adobe Photoshop CS3 Extended screen showing a U3D 3D file open inside the application. http://www.adobe.com http://www.adobe.com http://www.cadalyst.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Cadalyst - December 2007

Cadalyst - December 2007 Contents Editor's Window Cad Central Autodesk Gets Digital Top Honors - Saluting Outstanding CAD Products NX 5, Part 2 — CAD/CAM/CAE Software Autodesk 3ds Max 2008 —3D Modeling, Animation, and Rendering Software Document Management: Is It Still Valid? Standardizing 3D Modeling Nomenclature Share and Share Alike Cad Cartoon Issue Indexes Cad Fidential

Cadalyst - December 2007

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