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Re: Blender to KiCAD export addon

 

Hi Andrew,

It may be useful for users to know about it, eg: on https://forum.kicad.info 
Also you may check with kicad webpage maintainers if they would like to add it as an external tool.

Maurice did a similar (propose) exporter for FreeCAD,
https://forum.kicad.info/t/kicad-stepup-new-exporter-for-3d-mcad-feedbacks-are-welcome/1048
you may have a look on the VRML output it generates to get some ideas, if you want to optimize your (generated VRML file) size.

"KiCad's rendering of some parts made by me"
How did you develop that parts on blender? I mean, did you use for kind of (script?) automation or was manual work?
How does blender fits to create CAD parts? (as blender is not develop for CAD design)

On the other side, if you find any VRML files that KiCad is not capable of reading,
you could test my branch: https://code.launchpad.net/~mrluzeiro/kicad/kicad_new3d-viewer
and see if any broken models are parsed and render correctly on this new 3d plugins / 3d-viewer source code.


Regards,
Mario Luzeiro

________________________________________
From: Kicad-developers [kicad-developers-bounces+mrluzeiro=ua.pt@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] on behalf of Andrew Zabolotny [zapparello@xxxxxxxxx]
Sent: 30 April 2016 10:59
To: kicad-developers@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [Kicad-developers] Blender to KiCAD export addon

Hello!

I've made a Blender addon which can be used to export Blender objects to *.WRL files understood by KiCad.

In fact, I took the original VRML2 export plugin and changed it to make its output undistinguishable (for KiCad) from the Wings3D output.

The result is quite good and the addon is very easy to use. I've made a few parts in Blender which can be found here:
http://cs.ozerki.net/zap/pub/kicad-blender/

KiCad's rendering of some parts made by me:
http://cs.ozerki.net/zap/pub/kicad-blender/sample.jpg

The plugin can be downloaded from here:
https://github.com/anpaza/kicad-libs/tree/master/io_scene_kicad

There's also a short instruction, should be enough to get you going.

--
Andrew

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