Corporate Requirements

The transition from design to Technical Illustration.

Ever since the introduction of 3D CAD systems, industry has pushed to be able to use this available data automatically for publishing purposes. In practice, however, success in this area has always been limited. Leading companies have tried to bring in 3D data from CAD systems for use in publishing. Their experience has shown that while the data can be transferred, a great deal of manual editing is required in the Technical Illustration department.

There are many reasons for this limited success and its resulting high costs. One important reason is that while a CAD system is an excellent tool for creating design and production information, it cannot adequately address the needs of the Technical Illustration process. Direct export of CAD data to a publishing system is often hindered or even prohibited by limited filter functions. An additional reason is that the graphical requirements for product documentation - such as line widths, colors, or stylistic depiction of elements - are simply not offered by CAD systems. This means that manual generation of the illustration data or considerable editing of the existing CAD data is required to create Technical Illustrations. From an economic perspective, this is simply not feasible.