Altium Designer’s footprints have a concept of a static height field
While clearly inferior than a 3D Body, I was curious if KiCad had a similar concept for storing a simple, single height information for a footprint for cases where 3D Bodys are not otherwise available.
Not in actual stable version.
There are open gitlab issues referring this topic:
You can make one universal 1x1x1 cubic 3D body and when inserting it for footprint you can scale each diameter to what you need.
A very useful addition would be the concept of underside clearance. A really simple (and easy to grasp) example would be a DIP package. It is very possible to put 0402 or 0603 components under a DIP without any problem. However, almost every PCB design program will complain about DRC violations…
Yeah yeah, custom rules. But they are not exactly easy to set up, and the documentation on custom rules is very hard to follow. I’ve only ever had any success with custom rules by copying the examples and tweaking them.
DRC is there to prevent us from making mistakes. Some mistakes are easy to make. But putting footprints so close to eachother so that they become an assembly problem is not one of them.
I explicetly turned overlapping footprints into warnings. The main reason was that it interferes with what I do with screw terminals. If I have 2x 3P screw terminals in schematic I put them so close that I can use a single 6P terminal in the board.
And then are these hybride SMD/THT contraptions.
If I ever manage to ruin a board by putting footprints so close to eachother, I simply stop making PCBs 
Gonna put these warnings on ignore as well.
My recommendation is to go into the “Violation Severity tab” in Board setup and simply put ‘Courtyard overlap’ on ignore.
I Upvoted one of the gitlab issues. 
Bas
I have done it at once when DRC started to check it 
Because of:
Not mentioned but worth knowing and perhaps useful…
The 3D-Viewer has a Grid-Setting and the Footprints have Bounding-Boxes. Settings in Pref’s.
It’s far from perfect but useful in a ‘pinch’, so to speak…
Example below shows:
• 1mm Grid
• Background colors set to White (to improve visibility)
• Bounding-Box (Green)
• Ref drawing
• Inverted Color (1-Click, done in graphic program)
Screenshot tweaking (inverted color) can improve clarity
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