Alibre Inc. will begin including Adobe Acrobat 3D, a $995
retail value, with Alibre Design Expert ($1995) products, as
soon as logistic and reseller channel details are settled.
Alibre becomes the first CAD vendor to bundle Acrobat 3D, and it
sees the benefits from the bundle as a key component of its
product strategy.
Fishing reel created and rendered with Alibre by Michael
Berglund, designer for EMCAD in Sweden
The next version of Adobe Acrobat 3D, due the first quarter
of 2007, will feature the PRC data format Adobe acquired with
the purchase earlier this year of CAD translation specialist TTF.
Use of the PRC format will essentially allow 3D PDF files to
become a neutral repository for CAD data. This will make it easy
for those without a copy of their company’s CAD standard to
still have read/write access to design data. “Collaborate early
and collaborate often,” is how Greg Milliken, CEO of
Alibre, describes the new
engineering environment that can evolve with the use of tools
like Alibre Design Professional and Adobe Acrobat 3D. “The
sooner 3D models can be created and shared, the better it is for
the organization."
The collaboration doesn’t have to stop with the user of
Alibre's retail products, which also include Alibre Design
Standard for $995 and Alibre Professional for $1495. The
company’s “permission marketing” approach starts with Alibre
Design Xpress, a subset of Alibre Design available for a free
download. In the future, any user of Acrobat 3D saves a 3D model
in Acrobat 3D and enables data access in the free Adobe Reader,
then an Alibre Design user can pull the model from the 3D PDF,
edit the data, and return the model in 3D PDF. (For and Alibre
Design Xpress user, this will be subject to the file size
limitations in the product.)
Alibre Design is published in 16 languages, including three
Chinese versions, Czech, Slovak, Polish, and Swedish.
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