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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