I started with a PCB that has a lot of custom components on it, most of which don’t have 3D models. I need to send a model off to the case guy, so I’m suddenly motivated.
I poke View -> 3D Display. After a pause, I get a 3D display of the board with lots of components not installed.
I made a fairly simple model in FreeCad, exported it as .wrl, set that model as belonging to a component. Fortunately I hadn’t done this before so I just did one.
Then to see my work I poked View -> 3D Display. After a pause, pcbnew crashed.
Doing this from the command line gives me the oh-so-informative message “Segmentation fault (core dumped)”
Hi @Tim_Wescott EDIT you are using a quite OLD version of Kicad…
Please consider to use latest stable release 4.0.2 (released in February 2016)
Anyway … if you are planning to use STEP MCAD models, there is a consolidated road to use them also fine with old 4022 stable release…
please have a look here for the STEP mechanical exporter
and here for a lot of library models already tested for kicad
and some ready to go 3D libs
3D kicad libraries List: Resistors_SMD.3dshapes Capacitors_SMD.3dshapes Capacitors_Tantalum_SMD.3dshapes Housing_SOIC.3dshapes Housings_QFP.3dshapes
Thanks Maul – I hadn’t realized that there was a new stable release.
Would you happen to know if it’s made it to Ubuntu 16.04? Depending on the app, trying to upgrade outside of the official path sometimes works under Ubuntu and sometimes fails in an extraordinary miserable way. I may need to upgrade 'buntu.
There are many bugs in the legacy parsers, but in general the VRML output from Maui’s scripts should be fine. The development branch has new model parsers (which hopefully don’t have any bugs) and the 3D models are now handled by plugins. The next stable release (whenever that happens) will have the new model parsers, a new 3DViewer, and even the ability to use IGES/STEP models directly in the 3DViewer (no more need for VRML).
Are you sure, the KiCad blog at https://kicad.org/post/in-development-3d-plugins/ says that the new 3D viewer was merged into Nightlies inn 6664.
I am using Nightlies on a 16.04 machine successfully
There should be no need to build your own.
The post says the new 3D plugins were merged; at the bottom of the post you can see it stated that you need to use Mario’s newer 3DViewer, which is still in development, if you want to see the plugin data displayed in 3DViewer. The current 3DViewer still uses the legacy parsers so it will still segfault on many good files or fail to correctly display some valid files.
I didn’t ask for any nightly build for any type of Linux since it is relatively easy to configure/build/install on those systems. I didn’t request any OSX builds either since there are very few OSX devs and I don’t want to add to their work at this stage.
@Tim_Wescott
please consider that if you use the latest develop branch or the latest 3d-viewer branch, at this time, both of build have environment variable support broken, particularly if they are assigned as system variables. They are honored only if set as internal kicad variable. That misbehavior should be fixed I hope asap… (tested with KISYS3DMOD and KIPRJMOD)
Maurice
Actually, I was asking if it’d work with 14.04. Yes, I need to get around to upgrading my distro.
At any rate, I uninstalled the native Ubuntu version and installed the latest stable version, and the wrl files produced by FreeCAD don’t crash the viewer. They don’t seem to show up at all, but they don’t crash the viewer.
I’m drifting off topic here – but is there a good tutorial on how to make 3D models and have them work in version 4.02-stable?
Hi @Tim_Wescott
have you tried the wrl at these libraries?
3D kicad libraries List: ResistorsSMD.3dshapes CapacitorsSMD.3dshapes CapacitorsTantalum_SMD.3dshapes HousingSOIC.3dshapes HousingsQFP.3dshapes are you working with 4.0.2 stable?
they should be fine with the stable release…
moreover you can have a look at kicad StepUp… inside the StepUp tools there is a button (function) to export FC 3D models to kicad wrl compatible with stable and dev branches…
please let me know if you have any issues…
Maurice
Fixed thanx @Rene_Poschl