3d Extrude and Bevel printing prob

[katiewilkibob]

Can anyone help me?!!

Have some simple product drawings for a client that my boss and I decided would look better with a bit of depth, to make things simple we just used the 3D Bevel and emboss filter in illustrator CS, this did not cause a problem till some leaflets with the products got sent to the printer. Whenever the file got made into a printable format, PS or PDF, thin white lines would appear all over the drawings, we've looked at the settings in Illustrator to try and eliminate the problem but to no avail, the only thing is to save as a flattened image in photoshop, which isn't practical, anyone got any ideas????

[PrintDriver]

Illy's bevel and extrude , if you'll pardon the expression, SUCK. :mad:
The white lines happen when the image is flattened. Check your flattening settings when creating a pdf. Or try exporting them as raster images and printing that way, without flattening or expanding in Illy, which you said isn't practical but oh well.

You can try going here:
http://www.adobe.com/studio/print/index.html
and seeing if one of the white papers on pdfs at the bottom of the page will help you out.
:D

[katiewilkibob]

Thanks for the advice, I have never gone down the 3D route in Illustrator before, never wanted or needed to, I will never again, it is clearly crap :D ! Gonna try changing the PDFs and see what happens. Do you know if there are any 3D plug ins for Illustrator?

[PrintDriver]

Check out HotDoor. com. I know they have some great CAD tools. I use those all the time. I've not checked out their other stuff but they have always been good to me and have nice customer service folks.
Try their demo first to see if it's what you want.

[katiewilkibob]

cheers for the tip, boss is gonna ring when that side of the world os awake!

[PrintDriver]

Well, I'm awake. I think. Maybe. It's 7am though. :D
Perspective looks promising. Download the demo while you wait.
Good luck.