How do I prevent the the copper layer from being visible on the final PCB surface like shown here:
I am going to be sending the PCB to a manufacturer.
Go to pad properties of footprint and unselect F.mask and F.paste
Place the PCB in a box is one option 
What do you mean ? are you talking about solder mask please ? donât know what this PCB is gonna do but thatâs how it looks and if you want to hide the copper try a black solder mask or white even 
Sorry for not being clear, I mean the green shown on the rendering. How do I make the green color uniform across the board? Maybe I am unfamiliar with PCB manufacturing.
So you want those copper pads hidden by mask? But then you canât make electrical contact to them. It thatâs alright, you want copper fill areas, not pads, which are normally for soldering or making contact to.
No, I am not talking about the pads. I mean the green areas. I want them all uniform in the final product. I want to line through the center of the board to disappear.
The basic breakdown of what we are looking is this, the darkest green colour you can see is the actual board itself, a substrate if you like. The lighter green is the conductive copper that has the âSolder Maskâ over it to protect it and then the yellow is exposed copper so no mask on that, this is the points where the components of you project are soldered to and of course the white is the âsilkscreenâ layer for you to add additional remarks.
You cant do that the gap is because the conductive areas are electrically isolated ! as I pointed out you can make it less visible with a different solder mask colour otherwise thatâs the way it is.
Will covering the whole board in silkscreen cover the non-solder masked areas and masked areas uniformly?
Sorry no ! it would look a mess and no FAB would touch it. Perhaps you could explain why you need to do this and then perhaps we could find a solution, because maybe we have crossed wires here, pun intended,
Well your wording is confusing then. The line down the middle is not copper. There is no copper there. It is in fact the board. The areas above the copper look a bit lighter, but thatâs because the 3D rendering doesnât show the mask as totally opaque. Turn off the visibility of F.Cu in the 3D viewer and you will see itâs mask, except for the bare copper pads.
Here are a couple of screenshots. Normal rendering:
With F.Cu visibility off:
Forget about silkscreen. Silkscreen is the âpaintâ that creates those triangles, + and - signs.
Use black soldermask. That will hide most of the copper traces.
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Move copper layer to bottom and it will be not visible at top.
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The âproblemâ is te solder mask. It is slightly transparent. It just has to stop the solder and not to please some special aesthetics.
Use a black solder mask (might cost extra charge) or just have the pads themselfes on the front and stich them to the copper that you would have to move to the back. Thus, there is no copper on the front, except the pads.
There is no way to do what you want to do, the solder mask is slightly transparant so you will always see the copper underneath. It isnât as bad on real PCBs though, youâll see it but only if you look close enough!
Things you could do as âfixupsâ
- Different color solder mask (as others have already suggested): Black makes it a lot less visible
- Put a line in the silk screen⌠This will now be a white line there though, so not feasible I guess
- Put the copper on bottom(/inner) layers and only connect the pads with vias (assuming you need the thermals, this will be a very bad choice)
- Put something on top to hide it, a case or something similar
See images for different color real PCBs. Note that every manufacturer does it slightly different, so take this with a grain of salt!
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If the aesthetic of the board is vital to the project you could use the back side for routing or switch to a 4 layer design and use in-pad vias for connections, and then use a copper fill on the top layer. You would only have a small gap around the pads, which would be almost invisible.
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You will always see a âbumpâ when there is an etched to copper transition.
But, it might be worth a try. In my experience, PCB manufacturers donât have any issue with large areas of silk screen. I cover one of our production boards with a large white area behind an LCD, to act as a reflector. Nobody complains.