Designers rely on 3D PDF collaboration through rapid change iteration and design reviews

A flat-pack furniture and home-ware company leads the industry operating an intensive continuous design process. Their aim is to achieve very high functional product performance, cost control, sustainability and a continuous product development cycle with a large design department. To support the designers through rapid change iteration and design review panels, an efficient design capture and sharing process is needed. Individuals and small design teams create 3,000 innovative new product solutions each year, and then rely on a structured process to publish the designs internally, update iterations, and respond to review comments. An intranet portal system records and provides a common platform, however the full CAD and 3D design files are not easy for fast review by a larger team.

Solution: Designers upload proposals to a central review portal where server-side 3D PDF creation is triggered, enabling visual inspection including materials, fabric, textures, internal part structure, with review commenting and sign-off, generating 20x 3D PDFs per day.

Digital Distribution & Annotation:

“Although 3D technology has fully penetrated design and manufacturing processes themselves, outside of limited high-value applications, 3D has yet to be applied elsewhere in the product life-cycle. This is where PDF, which solved the digital distribution of drawings problem in the 1990s and 2000s, returns to meet current needs for distributing 3D information beyond CAD users.”

– “PDF in Manufacturing” PDF Association, 3D PDF Consortium, May 2020.

Application Area: Manufacturing, Product Design

Technologies Used: pdf3d.io

Image Courtesy of Marcin Lubecki <[email protected]>