Adobe has been adding 3D capabilities throughout its line of products and according to carefully planned leaks via Adobe’s blog pages and its recently published agenda for its annual Max conference, there is more to come. Adobe’s earliest expedition into 3D came with its support for CAD files via its 3D PDF tools, which are now available in Acrobat Pro Extended. Adobe has followed up by adding and improving 3D features in Photoshop, Premiere, and After Effects. Also, as Adobe integrated Flash support throughout its CS product line, it has added 3D similar 3D features to its Flash development platform.
What’s next? The Max program promises that Adobe Flash Player Engineer Sebastian Marketsmueller will present a deep dive into Adobe’s upcoming 3D API for its Flash Player in a presentation called “Flash Player 3D Future”. And, product manager Thibault Imbert promoted the session to readers of his blog, ByteArray.org. Answering the unasked question: What kind of 3D? What kind of API? he said, “Forget what you have seen before, it is going to be big.” Imbert hints that Flash developers can expect true textured z-buffered triangles, GPU acceleration, and much more. See Imbert’s post. See the Max program.
Adobe has gradually added 3D to its product line but the company has never taken the plunge and offered a 3D modeling tool. In talks with the company over the years, they have told us that they’re content to let partners like Autodesk, Maxon, Newtek, and others build 3D content creation tools and Adobe’s engineers will figure out how to put the content to work. With these latest leaks, it seems that 3D technology is crawling its way deeper into Adobe’s APIs.
Most of the news reports on Adobe’s added 3D capabilities focus on the battle between Apple and Adobe over streaming multimedia standards. In case you’re a zombie just come back to life, Apple favors HTML5 and generally trashes Flash and Adobe says Flash is better than ever and it’s continuing to push development forward. The battle ground is mobile computing and both sides are signing up allies.
