Does not make sense to me that updating KiCad should cause FreeCAD Preferences export menu to change, perhaps I am misunderstanding.
I have the KiCadSTEPUp workbench installed in FreeCADs Addon Manager. I cannot recall if that one is needed for STEP import to show, but I would definitely recommend to install it if not present. Perhaps @maui who is the author of KiCadSTEPUp would comment on that or if there is another dependency.
As commented above, many parts are missing their WRL counterpart displayed in KiCad in your image, so you need to work on how the locations of the 3D parts are defined in your project relative to the global defines in KiCAD.
Personally I make copies of everything I use in my projects to dedicated folders under my user name, and reference that, as locations of 3D components and footprint names are subject to changes in folder structures when KiCad and the libraries evolve and are revised.
“Does not make sense to me that updating KiCad should cause FreeCAD Preferences export menu to change, perhaps I am misunderstanding.” Yes, I fully agree with you with this and the with the missing components.
I’ll try the KiCadSTEPUp workbench a little later .
@LM21 as @otoien already pointed out, kicad installation doesn’t touch in any way freecad settings…
The STEP tab should be visible at start … anyway if you move to Part Workbench in FreeCAD, the STEP preferences tab must be available…
it shouldn’t change your results… if you miss the 3d objects in kicad, you would miss them also in freecad.
About the missing step option in preferences: I have to try and see if I ran out of memory. I had 6Gbytes of ram of RAM but I may have had other SW running too.
And about missing components: That is an other problem. I would like to solve too.
In FreeCad preferences/import export , there is no Iges or Step options, when I open the Freecad. When I open a Step files, they appear, and stay visible even if I close the step-file.
