[vtkusers] PDF 3D Support

[Michail Vidiassov]

Dear Ian,

On Fri, 18 Jan 2008, Ian Curington wrote:

> If I may, I'd like to comment on VTK PDF 3D support. Depending on
> licensing and platform issues it might provide an alternate path for PDF
> 3D output. The PDF3D-SDK has a vtkPDF3DExporter class that directly
> captures the renderview pipeline to generate a 3D PDF file in one pass,
> without IDTF, U3D, or pdflatex. It's currently on Win32, with Linux port
> underway (not yet on Mac).
> Summary: http://www.pdf3d.co.uk/pdf/PDF3D-VTK-Brief-16january08.pdf

While the summary is nice and shows an improvement over VTK support in
earlier versions of your product (the example at 
http://www.pdf3d.jp/pdf/quadric-2a.pdf is not that nice),
it surprisingly lacks the 3D models, only 2d shots of them.
Please, extend the summary to an example, at least for quadric and 
boy head, with both 3D models and VTK code for them (to see if the output 
quality was achieved by your Exporter alone or required some precooking of 
data).
Some examples showing simple/elementary shapes and features are also welcome
(like points/colored points, lines/colored lines/lines with per vertex 
color and all that 3D Geometry, Surfaces, Textures, Labels, Actor Names 
in Model Tree, Transparency, Vertex color shading model, Alpha-Blended 
Textures promised in PDF3D VTK Integration Brief).
Sorry if I ask you something that is against your corporate policy.

How does the quality of PDF3DExporter output compare to results obtained 
by exporting from VTK to some 3D format and importing that data into 
Acrobat 3D (and/or other commercial 3D PDF making software)?
Almost everyone in that field claims that his compresssion of U3D is 
better than the reference implementation by Intel used in your product,
while the newer Adobe internal format PRC seems to have both better 
compression and additional features.
Some of the competitors also provide their own menus, that are stated to 
be an improvement over stock Reader ones.

  Sincerely, Michail