kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Cirilo Bernardo <cirilo.bernardo@xxxxxxxxx>]

I noticed a comment on a fix to step export on Mac:

"It will be sufficient until we get rid of kicad2step as an external
utility."

Unfortunately I do not see kicad2step being integrated and for a few years now
I wish I had not made the STEP rendering part of the kicad process. The reason
is that OCE/OpenCascade has its own faults and running it within the kicad
process space can of course result in segfaults which cause kicad to
mysteriously
shut down. In hindsight all STEP visualization should have been accomplished
by a tool running in a separate process space to produce the intermediate
scenegraph which is used by kicad.

In general the intermediate scenegraph as well as the VRML parser can do with
some improvements (if there is anyone out there with the inclination
and free time
to do it). The scenegraph can be modified slightly to improve compatibility with
VRML2 while also improving efficiency of the scene representation.  On the
VRML side the parser can be given some clues via VRML comments which may
help in rendering. At the moment all triangles are made visible from both sides;
this was done so that existing defective VRML models appear as solid objects
rather than bizarre shapes with holes in them. When kicad exports a VRML model,
that model renders all triangles from both sides and when the model is
re-imported all triangles are render from both sides twice. I have always
considered this a minor nuisance since it's not common that a model is
exported and reimported many times, but it does happen.

Cirilo