Zea ILLUSTRATIONS
Transform customer experience with 3D digital twins of products. Increase the quality of technical illustrations. Streamline documentation workflows
“We used to hand out PDFs and hope the techs figured it out. Now, with Zea, they get 3D interactive instructions right through our dealer portal website. It’s easier to train them, and they actually enjoy using it.”
David Lord, Director of Customer Service, ZEAL Motor
Transform Customer Experience with Interactive 3D, Animated Technical Documentation
As manufacturing transitions to web-based, online documentation instead of static PDFs and printable manuals, Zea helps transform the experience with fully interactive, animated digital twins of products.
- Interactive Digital Twins. Give your customers a true 3D digital twin of their product embedded in your online documentation & training.
- Animate. Bring a new dimension to your projects through animation. Explode complex assemblies.
“It's so easy to get started with Zea! I have been using Zea Illustrations to update our technical documentation.”
Neil Addison, Parrot Drones
Reduce Manual Labor AND Improve Quality by Streamlining Workflow and Improving Collaboration
The old way of creating technical illustrations involved loading the product in a CAD program, taking screenshots, editing them, pasting it in a word processor, and repeating the manual labor all over again whenever there’s a change. Zea streamlines this by providing a collaborative online authoring tool for your 3D technical illustration needs.
Author and Edit Technical Illustrations on the Web:
Author.
Add your 3D models to use in your illustrations with ease. Every view you need for your project, all on our centralized web platform, to provide your audiences with deeper understanding of your products and process.
Edit.
Fine-tune your illustrations down to the smallest detail. Transform locations, materials, visibilities and camera angles and add callouts, annotations, and labels to convey crucial information and enhance clarity in your documents.
Export in the Highest Quality.
Export in SVG vector and PNG raster formats. No more messing with low resolution screenshots.
Model Updates Automatically.
When products change, it reflects in the application without having to find and load the new CAD models.
Collaborate.
Manage all your 3D projects in one place on the web, supporting multiple content authors. With Zea's content management system, your 3D content remains up-to-date across all documents.
“Simply put, Zea is working on solving a big problem for our team and the manufacturers we support.”
Cliff Anderson, Almon Inc.
FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS
Transforming CAD Data into Interactive 3D Technical Communications
How does Zea Illustrations speed up the technical documentation process ?
Traditional technical illustration involves taking 2D snapshots of CAD models, which becomes a bottleneck whenever engineering makes a change. Zea Illustrations allows you to create “views” directly from the 3D data. Because it is linked to the CAD source, updating an entire manual to reflect a new design iteration takes minutes, not weeks, allowing your documentation to keep pace with production.
Can Zea Illustrations replace traditional tools like Adobe Illustrator or CorelDRAW ?
While those tools are excellent for 2D graphics, they lack the “intelligence” of 3D data. Zea Illustrations provides a high-performance alternative that maintains the metadata of the parts. This means you can automatically generate callouts, Bill of Materials (BOM) tables, and exploded views that are interactive and “smart,” offering a level of clarity that 2D drawings simply cannot match.
Are the illustrations created in Zea mobile-friendly for shop floor technicians ?
Yes. Mobile accessibility is a core brand value. Whether a technician is using a ruggedized tablet on a shop floor in Ontario or a smartphone in the field, Zea’s lightweight WebGL engine ensures that complex 3D assembly instructions load instantly. This “paperless” approach reduces errors on the assembly line and ensures the latest version of instructions is always in the technician’s hands.
How do interactive 3D illustrations improve assembly and maintenance safety ?
Static diagrams can often be ambiguous, leading to costly assembly errors or safety risks. Zea Illustrations allows for animated step-by-step sequences. Users can rotate the assembly to see exactly how a part seats or where a fastener is located from any angle. By removing the “guesswork” from complex procedures, manufacturers see a significant decrease in assembly defects and “out-of-box” failures.
Does Zea Illustrations support industry standards like S1000D or DITA ?
Zea is designed to fit into modern digital threads. Our platform allows you to export high-resolution SVG/vector graphics for traditional print manuals while simultaneously providing a web-ready 3D player. This hybrid approach allows you to maintain compliance with legacy documentation standards while transitioning your organization toward an Industry 4.0 digital-first strategy.
What is the "Zea advantage" when it comes to rendering large-scale industrial illustrations ?
Most web-based illustration tools struggle with large datasets, forcing users to simplify models until they lose critical detail. Leveraging the Zea Engine, our illustration tool handles massive assemblies with tens of thousands of parts without lagging. This means you can illustrate an entire engine room or a complete aircraft assembly in one go, providing a holistic view of the product that competitors can’t replicate.