Preserved Topic: 3d program needed for outline drawings-no shading

Following kromaZ suggestion I am posting in the print forum for expertise on 3d programs to do instuctional manual drawings. No shading, just clean black and white linework in Postscript. All intended for litho print. I use Adobe Dimensions 3 right now but it is a bit anemic like when you need compound curves.

i suggest www.rhino3d.com, awesome 2d ability, export to a number of formats including Adobe Illustrator and generic EPS

Weadz (posting like a madman)

Thanks Weadah...I will check it out.!

Adobe Dimensions is what we use. It's not terribly impressive, but it's cheap and copy and paste into other Adobe apps is smooth.

Good point there, Jeni.

One of the main draws that I have to Adobe products is that they all work together seamlessly. While Rhino3d is an *excellent* product and would do what Not well would want it to do, the integration *might* be difficult unless you're well versed in it. Adobe is great because all of their interfaces are, for the most part, exactly the same. Anyone that knows Photoshop can learn, for example, GoLive! witout much trouble.

So that's an important aspect that is often overlooked...

except by Macromedia, who was sued by Adobe for stealing their interface. Heh


s t e p h e n

Thanks Jeni and twitch! When I render in Dimensions, I add 5 lights at 100% to guarantee no shading and specify a black stroke. It works fairly well but leaves stray lines that I have to block out in Illustrator.

Trivia from Adobe horses mouth(a rep letting it slip at our Mac club meeting) Contrary to the popular press, from Adobe Illustrator 3 onward, you have always been able to print from the program itself, smooth hi-resolution non-jaggy linework to a NON-Postscript printer. The reason? Illustrator 3 had Acrobat rasterizing code in it. Just don't expect the same results if the same drawing is placed into a pagelayout program and then printed to a non-postscript printer.

Weadah...I downloaded the trial version of Rhino 3d and am running it in Virtual PC on my Mac. It looks to be awesome. Wished I had the time and the type of clients to support the kind of things it can do. Will definitely give it a test drive this weekend.