X-Authentication-Warning: delorie.com: mail set sender to geda-user-bounces using -f X-Recipient: geda-user AT delorie DOT com X-Injected-Via-Gmane: http://gmane.org/ To: geda-user AT delorie DOT com From: Kai-Martin Knaak Subject: Re: [geda-user] 3D view Date: Sat, 28 Mar 2015 01:35:48 +0100 Organization: Institut =?UTF-8?B?ZsO8cg==?= Quantenoptik Lines: 63 Message-ID: References: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8" X-Complaints-To: usenet AT ger DOT gmane DOT org X-Gmane-NNTP-Posting-Host: 130.75.103.107 User-Agent: KNode/4.14.1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit X-MIME-Autoconverted: from quoted-printable to 8bit by delorie.com id t2S0QrLf009681 Reply-To: geda-user AT delorie DOT com Peter Clifton wrote: > Out of curiosity, what is your need / requirement for the 3D view? There > are many possible reasons and I'm curious what people actually want. > Well, you certainly know what I want: A reliable way to communicate pcb data to my 3D CAD application and back. This should include positions and orientation of components. The use case is straight forward -- make sure that the end product fits into its enclosure. In this scenario a nice 3D preview comes almost automatically as a bonus. I'd rather not put 3D models in the realm of pcb. An UI infrastructure to design in 3D is far beyond the scope of a EDA layout application. But even a good render engine is non trivial. These are tasks that are better relegated to 3D CAD applications and specialized render engines. With these considerations in mind I still think that communication to and from freecad would be advantageous. freecad can read python code natively and interpret it as a geometrical data. I haven't looked into it in detail. But I bet, it is possible to pass position and orientation of components in this python code. Even if it isn't, the devs are probably happy to add support for it. See the freecad python topological scripting manual for details: http://freecadweb.org/wiki/index.php?title=Topological_data_scripting Once in freecad, the road is open to STEP, IGES or VRML. So you could turn to blender or povray for polished rendering. Or you could do your actual 3D design in solidworks or inventor. Since freecad is fully scriptable, this would not need to involve starting the freecad UI. ---<)kaimartin(>--- PS: I can't help to note the coherent style and readability of their documentation. You may also take a look at the start page http://www.freecadweb.org/ IMHO, the mix of presentation and documentation is exemplary in many ways. -- Kai-Martin Knaak tel: +49-511-762-2895 Universität Hannover, Inst. für Quantenoptik fax: +49-511-762-2211 Welfengarten 1, 30167 Hannover http://www.iqo.uni-hannover.de GPG key: http://pgp.mit.edu:11371/pks/lookup?search=Knaak+kmk&op=get