Exporting board to Blender

[_AW]

I am trying to export a model of my PCA from KiCAD (v6.0.2) to Blender. I started by simply exporting a VRML. Blender opened it, but it did not keep the soldermask color (I have it defined as black in the board properties) and it has a problem of randomly mixing the soldermask layer and the copper layer.

The other thing is it imports thousands of faces into the object tree.

I then tried using StepUp to get the board into FreeCAD, which I was able to do successfully. However, getting the board to save in a format from FreeCAD that Blender can open is also a problem. It seems that FreeCAD does not export to VRML correctly. If I export to VRML from FreeCAD, FreeCAD can properly reopen the file, but no other VRML viewer can open it. All the viewers (including Blender) I have tried give errors.

I cannot find a method to properly export my PCA, including colors, so that Blender can open it as an object and just use it. Does anyone have a method that they know works?

I am using FreeCAD 0.19.3 and Blender 3.0.1.

[der.ule]

I am not sure if this old thread from @Anool would help:

Blender render experiments

I’ve been putting off using Blender since over 5 years, being intimidated by the complex UI and workflow, until this month when I mustered courage to go through Andrew Price’s Doughnut tutorials. My aim was to learn how to do photo-realistic renders of KiCad boards. I started off with the Open Hardware Summit 2020 badge (which I had a bit role in designing). KiCad’s in-built ray-tracer does a decent job, but there is no way to adjust lighting, background and other parameters. This is what it lo…

[_AW]

Thanks for the reference… what ended up working good enough for what we are trying to do was to use StepUp into FreeCAD and then export to an OBJ, which can import into Blender. We lost some coloring, but can put it back once it is in Blender.

It seems like the VRML export has a couple of bugs. Like not using the solder mask color defined. The way it shows up in Blender with the conflicting copper and soldermask, I don’t know if that is Blender’s fault or KiCAD.

Anyway, we got something to work well enough for our purposes, which was to include the board in an assembly animation of our full final product. Unfortunately, I don’t have time available to look into improving this process. It seems that it should be as simple as just VRML exporting the board with tracks and silkscreen and then you could have it in blender, basically like you have it in the KiCAD 3D viewer. The 3D viewer is adequate for a good board render, when all you need to see is the board. But when you need to do something else with that file, like we are, everyone seems to have their own work around and methods, none of which are straight forward.