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adamgreig / agg-kicad

KiCAD libraries, footprints, and scripts
MIT License
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3D Models #58

Open HarkonenBade opened 8 years ago

HarkonenBade commented 8 years ago

Would it be possible to either add 3D models for parts, or at least for standard things like 0603/1206 style packages to reference the standard kicad library models for those parts?

adamgreig commented 8 years ago

It would be really nice! I'm holding out on KiCAD supporting more 3d formats first, as the current format is a quite weird Wings3D thing whereas work is underway to support STL and other formats, at which point most parts can be downloaded from the manufacturer and the rest can be defined in text easily. Ideally the autobuilding scripts could then spit out a standard 3d package once you've told them the chip size and pin sizes.

It might be relatively easy to refer to existing KiCAD 3d parts (eg an extra optional field in build_mod_chip.py and build_mod_ic.py) but I've not looked in to it yet...

HarkonenBade commented 7 years ago

I've started collating some of my work on bits like this in https://github.com/HarkonenBade/kicad-models

Unfortunately I think until kicad supports more reasonable model formats, or someone writes a VRML exporter targeted at kicad, I don't think programmatic generation of models is going to be reasonable. Also I've been using openscad for a lot of stuff and really it needs better support for specifying colors/materials of objects.

So for now I would set this issue to awaiting upstream changes.