Hi,
I'm new to KiCad. I've been working on a pet project recently and
stumbled upon some issues with 3D models that I would like to put up
for discussion.
The most important issues are the following:
1.) I would like to see a slightly more generic way to specify the 3D
model, so that both .step and .vrml export would generate complete
models, with all the components properly placed on them.
2.) I would be grateful if KiCad allowed VRML models to be in
millimetres rather than just mils (there could be a checkbox if
needed; there is a field to enter the scale, but pipelines refuse to
accept "scaled models").
And some less important include:
3.) For some THT models that come in metric dimensions it's a bit
annoying that they need to be centered around pin 1. If I try to
submit a board with THT components for assembly (to jlcpcb at least),
the rendering of the components is wrong: they expect the components
to be centred. The same argument applies to footprints though, not
just for the 3D models. It would be super useful to me if THT
components would also have the "center point" defined and if I could
have a global checkbox on the PCB that would allow me to snap to grid
or specify locations of the center of components rather than only be
able to specify the location of pin 1.
4.) There seems to be a bug with 3D VRML models from cadquery. I'm not
yet sure if the one to blame is KiCad or cadquery, but I submitted a
bug report that should hopefully lead to some proper diagnosis and
finally a fix.
--- --- --- ---
Ad 1.)
I designed the boards in KiCad and my friend used SolidWorks to design
the 3D model of a toy accordion.
Initially I tried exporting the board into .step, but I ended up with
only the raw board being exported, without any elements. I googled a
bit and stumbled upon a suggestion to export to .vrml. Export to .vrml
seemed to work: I could open the resulting file in FreeCAD, but it
seems that SolidWorks doesn't know how to open/import a VRML file, and
I didn't manage to find any suitable way for conversion (FreeCAD
doesn't know how to convert VRML into STEP).
After some trial-and-error I figured out that I could edit the
footprints and replace all the .vrml models with the .step models and
suddenly the export to .step worked like a charm. Of course this means
that the export to .vrml no longer works as expected, it means that
there must be plenty of other users stumbling into the same problem
(just assuming that .step export is inferior in functionality?), and
it requires quite some additional work to change all the footprints
(once they are already placed to the board). (Is there an easy way to
change all the 3D models on the board from VRML to STEP other than
opening the PCB in a text editor and run a search-and-replace?)
It would be really really great if there was a way to specify the 3D
model belonging to a footprint in such a way that both exports would
work out-of-the-box. This probably means that either the extension
(.vrml/.step) needs to be left out (and KiCad would automatically pick
whatever 3D model it finds or needs for a particular export), or that
a footprint should have two fields: one for.vrml and one for .step. Or
potentially some other solution.
Ad 2.)
All the VRML models generated with CadQuery 2
https://gitlab.com/kicad/libraries/kicad-packages3D-generator/-/merge_requests/24
seem to be affected by two issues (and are thus broken, though the
generated files haven't been added to the relevant repository yet, so
it's not yet "visible"):
a) the exported models are using millimeters and KiCad expected mills
b) there's a rendering issue
(https://gitlab.com/kicad/code/kicad/-/issues/12400)
Nowadays all the footprints are specified in millimetres. It would be
helpful if millimetres also became acceptable for the 3D models one
day.
But more importantly it would be really great if the issue with
generated VRML files was fixed in one way or another. Either the
scripts need to be fixed to generate the model using a different
scale, or there needs to be some agreement that it's likely that
millimetres will become acceptable at some not too distant point in
the future.
I would like to add a few missing 3D models to the library and it
would help to know how to proceed.
Any thoughts?
Thank you very much,
Mojca
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