Here is a question for you Publishing experts out there. Recently was asked to come up with a couple cut-away rendered models for brochures of a few rooftop HVAC airscrubbers Ive been building. Converted a couple good size assemblies to SW-2004 and used the groovy new texture feature to produce a couple very nice rendered iso's without photoworks. (I'll email pdf's if interested) My meager dell-ws P4 1.7 quadro 2 mmx 256 was pushed to its limits, as it was increasingly difficult to add more color,texture and lighting, but worked well considering.
Our two literature folks requested two different types of formats. One uses Adobe Illustrator 7 and wanted eps or pdf formats in which surfaces could be selected and the background transparent. The other uses Corel 8 and wanted hpgl prn files.
I used Distiller, set at its oldest conversion settings, to produce both. When saving to file with distiller I get two options, save as prn and all files which I added the .eps extention to and seemed to work, generating
1.5mb files.The one using Corel had no problem with the prn's. Imported nicely and did't want to selected surfaces, colored model as is just trimming background for poster. The Illustrator couldn't open the .eps and the .pdf was raster. Tried version 10 but resulted in a sliced model. Tried other virtual printers, but wouldn't produce populated eps files.
The only solution to provide a vector format was to create a dxf, which came in as line art, losing all its surfaces. She then had to apply surfaces and colors to it in Illustrator.
My questions are; Since our literature people compete more than cross communicate I wondered if corel or photoworks would do better at generating a eps file that would be editable ?
Secondly are eps files inherently vector format?
Are there any good ways to get a model from solidworks to other editable formats used in publishing?
What is the prefered software to produce literature from solidworks? how about 3d studiomax?
thanks, bobd