Blender was around (open source since 2002) And i would argue it is more powerful now and also was more powerful back then. (Just the modifier support is worth it as it allows working similarly as with a parametric tool. It could however be that that was added later. I am sure it was already old news when i played with it back in 2007.)
It currently supports x3d which is the successor to wrl. Not sure if it supported wrl in the past or if it supported x3d from the very beginning. (x3d superseded wrl back in 2001)
Blender did support wrl since what I remember … I used Blender for KiCAD rendering and movies…
Blender 2.8 ATM has an issue with KiCAD wrl code… people may have a look at here to help in fixing https://developer.blender.org/T71232
PS this thread reminded me something I forgot It took me two years to obtain the developers forget Wings3D …
Yea and your scripting stuff (or in general your forum discussion about your 3d model lib) was the reason why i got interested. I made scripted 3d models for the phoenix MSTB and MC connectors as a result of that.
To showcase them meant i needed to make footprints. I did not want to make them by hand which brought me to the footprint generators of @pointhi.
Who was part of the library team and asked me to contribute my footprints to the lib. Which in turn resulted in https://github.com/KiCad/Connectors_Phoenix.pretty/pull/2. Well and the rest is history.
Yep, and way much more complex also… I’ve tried many times to learn it, but I never had the energy that it took. Wings has always been more straightforward, and given the (average) low complexity of our models, there was no need for the extra power of Blender.
By the way, I don’t know if this matters as, AFAIK, Blender does not export to STEP also…
Because Blender is a serious artistic tool, when the appearance matters, not a CAD application.
Wings3d is also for artistic purposes, but a lot less capable than Blender
Thank you to everyone for all the repsonses, I never expected as many. @Walter_Lain I am very happy to here the library is still alive and STEP files might happen. I to use Altium by day and KiCAD by night so I am well aware of the problems with step files, but right now I would agree they are the nearest thing to a usable standard we have. Again thank you for all the effort you have put into your libraries, and a thank you to the KiCAD developers, it’s a bit of software to be proud of !
(open source since 2002) And i would argue it is more powerful now and also was more powerful back then. (Just the modifier support is worth it as it allows working similarly as with a parametric tool. It could however be that that was added later. I am sure it was already old news when i played with it back in 2007.)
It took me two years to obtain the developers forget Wings3D …
