This RPS 3D PDF Tutorial will help you create an interactive
PDF
document from
SketchUp
.
Contents |
There is a 30 day Trial Version for RPS products. This is a fully functional version, with watermarks or other text added to indicate that it is a trial version.
Follow the links from the Downloads Page to download the latest version.
If the PDF loads, but the image appears only as a small grey box, then you are running and old version of Adobe Reader. RPS 3D PDF requires version 7.0.7 or later.
Download the latest version (currently 8.1) from: Adobe Reader
If the output PDF file is already open in Adobe Reader, you will need to close it before you can make a new one.
If the image appeared properly, then you can spin it by dragging the mouse over the image.
A toolbar will appear above the image:
The three left icons are for: Rotate, Pan, and Zoom.
The "House"" icon will restore the view you were in when you saved the model in SketchUp. Other views are available from the view dropdown.
Click them and try them out.
You can make a page in 4 modes:
(This will automatically check the Background Image check box)
Using the Page Setup options you can customize your PDF output.
By changing or leaving out text, you can use more of the page area for your 3D PDF file.
You can specify landscape or portrait orientation, and the size for the logo and image area.
Also, because of the way margins work, if you select a larger page size, and a taller image height, more of the page will be used for the image. This will make the text areas, if they are not blank, smaller.
Use Preview to check the page layout before creating the model.
Note: If the preview is blank, see if it has multiple pages. If it does have multiple pages, then you need to make the page size larger, or the image height shorter until everything fits one one page.
Font - Click Font to load the font setting dialog - to set face name, font style and size - and to see a preview of the font.
Size - Select a size from the drop down if you just want to change the size.
Color - click on the color square to change the color of the font.
We are unable to read the background and default face colors from the .SKP file at this time, so you need to specify them if you have used them in your model.
This defines what kind of lights will be used when the model is first loaded.
We are working on a new version for which the option File will most closely resemble SketchUp lighting levels. For now, White is good choice.
If you check "Model Defined", then each page you have defined inside of SketchUp will create a view for the PDF document.
If you check "Standard", then a standard set of views will be included.
Normally edge lines are not displayed as part of the Ray Trace rendering.
Note: SketchUp has a other edge settings for Profile, Depth Cue and Extension edges. We do not emulate these special edge line settings.
This loads a special dialog to adjust image quality changes.
This was provided to us as part of the U3D file generation software.
This sets up the margins for pages.
You can enter the margins directly, or you can set them visually by dragging the size handles.
3D PDF files can be embedded into a web page using the HTML EMBED format.
<EMBED src="./images/BoulderCourthouseP.pdf" width="500" height="700" href="./images/BoulderCourthouse.pdf"/>
For a sample web page with an interactive 3D PDF file embedded, see: PDF Sample Page