3D Viewer doesn't display components in 3D

The 3D viewer doesn’t display parts in 3D it shows the footprints.
The 3d path is configured correctly and it is /usr/share/kicad/modules/packages3d. The problem happened after updating the nightly build from version 4 to version 5 based release.

is the option to show 3D models enabled? are you able to see 3D models in preview?
Are you able to assign 3D models to shapes ? i.e: does your selection window show WRL and STEP files as suggestion? if not there is something wrong on the package installation

Updating nightly might have updated the library.

This is one of the dangers of using nightly

If the libs have been updated to the new library organization, then nearly all symbols, footprints and 3d models have a different name or live in a different lib then before the update.

Footprints are cached in the pcb_new file format. So even if you update your pcb stays valid. (similarly the symbols are cached in the cache lib and can be “rescued”.) There is no caching of 3d data.

To fix your problem i would suggest you install a version of the 4.x library somewhere convenient and point old projects to it. Part of this is explained in this FAQ post: How can i install a specific version of the footprint library?

The problem is that no 3d part is assigned to footprints. I assigned a 3d part to a footprint and it appeared on the board. Any idea how to fix this without assigning a part to each footprint manually ?

Text editor

(I hate the 20 char minimum)

Which file I should edit ?

The pcb file holds the information which footprint is connected to which 3d model file. So instead of doing the assignment manually to one footprint at a time you can use a text editor to do it for all similar footprints at once.

But the better solution is explained in my previous post. Install the old version of the 3d library and point kisys3dmod to it. Especially when you keep in mind that the library that comes with nightly is nowhere near stable at this point in time. (Updating it again might result in having the same problem again.)

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Your suggestion worked. Thanks.

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