Hey,
I’ve designed a simple board that has mostly through-hole resistors on it. I can get a 3D of my PCB just fine, but it shows just the holes - not populated components.
Is that even possible?
Yes this is possible. It looks like your paths to the components are not set up correctly.
Which KiCAD version are you using and on which System are you running it?
This is what appears to be the issue on my MacBook Pro. I’ve installed the june 30 nightlyies there - apparently not correctly. I opened the file on my Mac Pro and there it works fine 
What is the spacing of your leads? If you want pretty models (but I forget the pitch I used) you can use the pre-generated resistor models from my old project:
You can see examples of some of the resistor models (blue MFRs and beige CCRs) on the project page:
http://kicad3dmodels.sourceforge.net
I had the same problem on my Mac Book Pro. It was an issue with the PCB Library Tables that still have the KISYS3DMON environment variable set to the user who created the build i.e. Wolf. This was stopping me from accessing the 3D models. Here is the work around I posted on another forum…
For my problem, I had a rummage around. KiCad Info did not have any direct hits for this issue. But I did find the following…
The environment variables i.e. KISYS3DMOD are set to the directory of the builder e.g. Jenkins in my case. There is a tick to setting these values correctly otherwise the 3D models and other things can not be found.
From the Finder select the Go Menu -> Go to Folder -> ~/Library/Preferences/kicad/
In there, is a file kicad_common. The environment variables can be set/corrected there. Be sure NOT to be running kicad when changing this otherwise it the changes can be reverted on exit or KiCad restart.
The location of the 3D models are in /Library/Application Support/kicad/3dpackages and the KISYS3DMOD should be set to that value. My value for KISYSMOD was also wrong.
Check the values of your other environment variables to be sure that they actually exist or point to the correct location.
The KiCad extras has a “modules” folder for off-line work. Once configured, this means it would not be using the GitHub definitions. The fp-lib-table file in my install points to GitHub by default where as the fp-lib-table on the KiCad image relies on the KISYSMOD environment variable. If you have moved that file and directory into place but your KISYSMOD is wrong, then this could be a reason for the issues. For reference, I have added the fp-lib-table I am using (I had to compress the file as the forum would not accept the file with no extension).
A second point is with the Cvpcb. There are three icons for filtering the footprint list. In its default form, I too did not get any footprints at first. I get the best results with the far right icon – the one with the “L” on it.
This entry was created a while ago. I notice now on the Linux version of KiCad, there is a variables management menu option in PCBNew.
I hope this helps.
I have the same issue, it was looking fine, but now it looks like this:
I know the components are in the right place, if I go ray tracing then it looks like this:
And have gone through all the options looking for some sort “show board” option, but can’t find it.
Okay the difference is that when its only shows the holes/vias, then its using my graphivs card. When its shows the whole board then its using the intel built in motherboard graphics.
So it appears to be a problem with your Graphic Card drivers, best to open a new thread instead of bringing back to life one from 2015 where you describe your KiCAD version (Help->About->Copy Version Info) and your hardware.