I think you have a broader problem which is that the board itself isn’t displaying properly. I don’t want to spend any time debugging the model files and paths when the 3D viewer is fundamentally not working for you.
What is your graphics card and can you update the drivers?
Yeah sorry I messed up with the example chip, I’m completely new to to KiCad.
The point is that yes my first post was the PIC programmer, and it seems it works for gkeeth, but not for me. Neither does the chip show up for me, but obviously you can see it in the 3D view.
That may be true, but the components on the PIC programmer demo match what is in the first screenshot, with some squinting to ignore everything that’s missing. Still, I would like @Drexter to specify which demo.
I just updated Why a footprint points to a 3D model but the model file doesn't exist? with a screenshot from v6. You can see there if the footprint actually has a 3D model file available. But this time the problem is probably in the graphics, we have seen these before, and it has been a graphics card/driver issue.
If your drivers are up-to-date, then I don’t know what else to suggest. Issues like this are typically from hardware/drivers that have poor OpenGL support, which unfortunately is not uncommon. KiCad requires support for OpenGL 2.1 (~2006).
And to my suprise, using raytracing mode in 3D viewer, everything is now visible. I can’t speak for the opacity changing method, since I do not even know how to do that yet. But with raytracing it definitely works, it just takes ages to regenerate the model after even the slightest rotation/move.