About Publishing 3D DWF Files

You can publish DWF or DWFx files of your 3D models to be viewed and plotted with Autodesk Design Review.

You can generate DWF or DWFx files of your 3D models with nearly the same visual fidelity as your original DWG files. You can create a single or multi-sheet DWF or DWFx file with 2D and 3D model space objects.

Publishing Materials

If you assigned texture mapped materials to your models, those materials can be published with the 3D DWF or 3D DWFx file. Texture map orientation and scaling that is set in the drawing editor is retained in the published 3D DWF or 3D DWFx file.

There are some limitations to materials publishing.

Note: Because the DWF Viewer and the rendering engine are different, you may encounter some deviation in how the texture maps appear in the DWF Viewer.

Increase the Smoothness of 3D DWF or 3D DWFx Models

The smoothness of 3D DWF or 3D DWFx models is improved by changing the value of the 3DDWFPRECsystem variable. The setting for 3DDWFPREC ranges from 1 to 6. Higher settings greatly improve the appearance of objects in the DWF Viewer.

Note: 3DDWFPREC is a global setting that affects all objects in the 3D model. Therefore, higher values can result in very large file sizes.

Improve Performance with Large Models

Every object in your model gets processed when a DWF or DWFx file is published. When working with large models, you can greatly improve publishing performance by using blocks. For instance, your office model contains a basic cubicle arrangement of eight partition walls, a desk, and a chair. Those ten objects do not take much time to process by themselves. However, if that basic cubicle arrangement is used 100 times, it means that 1000 objects must be processed and the publishing time increases accordingly. If the basic cubicle arrangement is inserted into the model as a single block, those ten objects are processed once for each insertion.

You can improve publishing performance even more by grouping miscellaneous objects into temporary blocks. Once the publishing is complete, you can explode those blocks and continue working on those objects.

As a design gets closer to completion, you can create blocks comprised of portions of the model that are less likely to need further editing. If the first floor of the office model is not going to change much, create a block containing all of its components. During publishing, that block is processed as one object instead of each individual object on that floor.

3D DWF or 3D DWFx Unsupported Content

When publishing a 3D DWF or 3D DWFx file, some drawing content may not appear in the DWF Viewer. The content listed in the following table is not supported when you output a 3D DWF or 3D DWFx file.

Unsupported Content

Details

Animations and Walkthroughs

Block attributes

Font types (Various)

See the “Supported Text Fonts,” below

Gradient fills (Hatches)

Hidden edges

Hyperlinks

Images

Layer information

Lights and Shadows

Material components

  • Bump, Opacity, and Specular texture maps
  • Procedural materials (for example, wood & marble)
  • Reflection and refraction
  • Self-Illumination
  • Shininess
  • Translucency

Mtext (partial)

Bold and Italic text

Named views and cameras

OLE objects

Rays and X-lines

Section clipping and XClipping

Text thickness

Visual styles

Supported Text Fonts

Many text fonts are not supported when you publish a 3D DWF or 3D DWFx file. The following table lists the fonts that are published.

Supported Text Fonts

Arial

Arial Black

Comic Sans MS

Courier New

Impact

Lucinda Console

Lucinda Sans Unicode

Martlett

Tahoma

Times New Roman

Verdana

Verdana Italic

Webdings

Wingdings