kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Tomasz Wlostowski <tomasz.wlostowski@xxxxxxx>]

On 16.06.2015 12:40, easyw@xxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
> Hi Cirilo and Tom,
> 
> I tried OCC to import a stl shape (to263 from kicad lib generated from
> wings3d) and generate step and iges models and render it in wxpython...
> 
> please find attached the py code used for conversion and IGES and STEP
> generated

Hi Maurice,

This is cool! I did more or less the same in C++. There are few caveats
with OCC though:
- dealing with colors when loading STEP needs some extra code (OCC
doesn't handle color correctly if the color is an attribute of an
assembly instead of a single shape),
- when exporting a hierarchical STEP assembly, the hierarchy must be
build bottom-up,
- In order to get the names of the parts OK I had to dive in the
internal STEP representation of the data. It's not very complex, it just
takes a few extra lines of code.

For the moment, I'm thinking of making a wx IPC service that would
include OCC, mesh & cache models and export assemblies. It could be
built as an option. Other possibility is to use DLL plugins, but I'm
afraid it's a much bigger endeavor to get them to work reliably on all
OS platforms. Certainly not for the stable release.

Tom


> 
> Maurice
> 
> On 6/16/15 12:20 PM, Tomasz Wlostowski wrote:
>> On 16.06.2015 12:02, easyw@xxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
>>> Hi Cirilo,
>>>
>>> it seems that Peter Clifton has added AP214 support:
>>> http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.comp.cad.geda.user/43517
>>>
>> Hi Maurice,
>>
>> It looks like just a hack to me (just the board shape). Adding
>> components will be IMHO more complex... Besides Peter's approach does
>> not solve the problem of meshing/visualization of STEP component models
>> (see [1] for an example - this is all STEP).
>>
>> Regards,
>> Tom
>>
>> [1] https://edms.cern.ch/file/1158539/1/EDA-02189-V4-0_3D-top.jpg
>>