This is an invitation to everyone who likes to see better MCAD support in KiCad. Cirilo Bernardo has started to create an open library for handling IGES. His project is on github.
Please read about the announcement and the request for help for a better understanding on how you can help this project to move forward.
If you are interested in 3D stuff for KiCad, you should be ashamed if you have never heard of Cirilo before. But remember, it is never too late to learn new stuff and help others.
Update: as of 16 May 2015 the IGES tools can now be used to create models of a PCB. You can define a main outline using lines and arcs then subtract drill holes and irregular cutouts. The file test_plane.cpp is the source for the program “planetest” and it generates a number of test shapes to check that the geometry code works correctly. If anyone wishes to create more test cases they can use that source as an example to start with. The resulting IGES files are correctly processed by FreeCAD and SolidWorks.
The libIGES main CMakeLists.txt file may need some tweaking to suit your installation system. When I built SISL I also modified its CMakeLists.txt file to produce a shared library rather than the static libary.
As of May 29 there is a tool “idf2igs” which will convert an IDF file into an IGES model. At the moment only a bare board is generated but as the code is refined it will create a complete assembly model with colors.
OK, the assembly with colors was easier to implement than I originally thought, so here are some examples of IDF files converted to IGES and rendered by SolidWorks into 2D and 3D PDFs. The colors you see are what the idf2igs tool used; these are not hand-colored. Unfortunately if you use FreeCAD you will only see a uniform grey.