Tutorial and guidelines for better materials on 3D models

Hello all,

For those who are or will make new 3D models for Kicad:

In order to raise awareness, I created two tutorials that
works as a reference and guide to understand and how to set proper
materials to 3D models to be used in KiCad 3D-Viewer (or any other render)

The main scope are electronic components, VRML files, KiCad 3D-Viewer (current or any future version)

I’ve placed the documents in my cloud:

Let me know if I can assist you or help with any clarification!

Mario Luzeiro

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Hi Mario,

nice presentations!

Brilliant!
Should be incorporated into the official documentation!
Great job!

Thanks!
Let us know if you have nice renders and models so share!

Hi Mario, as you know the 3D library is growing day by day and it is using the materials as per your docs… :smiley:
We have already placed a link to your docs in the packages3D README.md but I was thinking if we could place the docs directly into the repo… the best would be to have also the source files not just the pdf… so it would be possible to modify the docs and add materials or whatever…
what do you think?

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And add translations too

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I can provide the libreoffice editable file next week, please remind me by email if I had forgotten…

what do you mean by add materials?

that will be perfect!

add other materials to the doc or modify some if needed in future releases
for example adding
material DEF LED-YELLOW Material
which is missing atm

ah ok you mean future additions in future to the doc. sure.

@kammutierspule would you happen to have the material properties for copper? Im missing it a bit for some inductors :slight_smile:
Im looking for something like this

I found some nice stuff here:
http://devernay.free.fr/cours/opengl/materials.html
http://vrmlstuff.free.fr/materials/
http://vrmlstuff.free.fr/materials/metalsframe.html

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I don’t have it at moment.

You can follow my tutorial to be able to get your material values your self.
you can use that picture to get the values.

Check after slide 20, “Create materials from photos” from the “KiCad_3D-Viewer_Illumination_model_and_materials-MarioLuzeiro.pdf”

You can use The Gimp or similar to get the RGB values.

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maybe this helps, if you can extract the info from the attached STEP/VRML files…

copper cube.wrl (7.3 KB)
copper cube.stp (9.3 KB)

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