kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Cirilo Bernardo <cirilo.bernardo@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Maurice,

 I will not attempt to convert VRML to IGES for a number of reasons:

1. VRML has no internal representation of unit measures
2. Many VRML models submitted by users do not have any guarantee
   of correct sizes and proportions
3. VRML models may contain what is known in the solid modeling field
  as Open Shells, which will cause problems when the MCAD software
  attempts to convert the IGES file and I have no plans to implement
  code which can detect open shells
4. Even if a VRML model had only closed shells, the typical precision
  of the VRML vertices will result in numerous defective faces in the
  MCAD model and endless input will be required from the operator to
  fix these problems
5. VRML representation is not efficient and this inefficiency will be
  multiplied during the conversion to IGES. Some fairly simple VRML
  models are already a few MB while the equivalent in native IGES is
  only a few tens or low hundreds of KB; an IGES file derived from,
  say, a 1MB VRML file can easily be in excess of 6MB

- Cirilo



On Mon, May 25, 2015 at 2:56 AM, easyw <easyw@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

>  Hi Cirilo,
> good to hear that!
> That would be an other good feature for kicad!
>
> Please consider also the option to convert and export vrml modules beside
> the plain pcb, so one can easily integrate the 3D rendering with the IGES
> export.
> I mean that, at the moment, modules has their vrml libraries and the 3D
> rendering is based on vrml too.
> So it would be a double work, without an internal and direct 3D feedback,
> to add iges modules to the project instead to export directly the vrml
> modules.
> May be it could be useful to add a check option (as for plain pcb export)
> to export pcb and vrml modules to iges.
>
> Please let me know your opinion...
> Maurice
>
>
> On 24/05/2015 08.07, Cirilo Bernardo wrote:
>
> Hi folks,
>
>  The IGES code is now at a stage where a PCB model can be generated with
> cutouts and drill holes
> and various component models can be placed within the assembly. I will
> conduct further tests by
> generating PCB assembly files from IDF files before moving on to planning
> the plugin refactoring in pcbnew, cleaning up the IGES lib in preparation
> for a possible merge into KiCad, and finally implementing the IGES export.
>
>  One thing to consider with the IGES code is whether it is better to
> eventually merge it with KiCad or to leave the library as a separate
> project in hopes that other people on the web will be interested in
> improving the code for other purposes.
>
> - Cirilo
>
>
>
>
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