kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Cirilo Bernardo <cirilo_bernardo@xxxxxxxxx>]

>________________________________
> From: Jason Whiteman <whitemanjason@xxxxxxxxx>
>To: KiCad Developers <kicad-developers@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> 
>Sent: Thursday, July 3, 2014 11:07 AM
>Subject: [Kicad-developers] New to dev - What I'm working on
> 
>
>
>Group,
>
>
>     Outside of managing the initial toolchain setup, and 1st week code orientation - here's a list of things I've been working on and a short blurb of how it is going:
>
>
[snip]
>
>2. 3D Viewer - board color (realistic mode)
>    Status: added preferences menu item to change board/soldermask color.  Was not happy with this being hard-coded.  Also save/restore result in config write/read.  Currently - Done (although I would prefer to add a modified layer widget method of doing this)
>
>
>See: http://imgur.com/VYX1ChW
>


Nice - maybe you can do the same for the VRML export some day? :)

[snip]
>
>6. 3D Viewer - Copper shows up inside pad with drill hole (Through-hole GND pin for example)
>    Status: Tried to fix - but have not identified a proper method.  
>


This is typical when multiple traces end at a pad; it has to do with the
clipping software's algorithms. In the VRML exporter this is correctly
handled by creating the polygons representing all traces, performing a
tesselation, then adding the thru-holes and cutouts and tesselating again.

One thing that annoys me (but which I don't care too much to fix) is the
appearance of features (text, drilled/plated holes) outside the board
outline. In the VRML export for example, when you look at the pic_programmer
demo you can see such artifacts. This may be useful for some people in
some situations, but I suspect everyone who uses the VRML view or exporter
will also want an option to clip such features. This is not so trivial, which
is why I ignored it in the VRML exporter.

- Cirilo