Okay, okay, I’ve been playing around with the 3D visualization in KiCAD, and now I want to be able to export a 3D model of a complete board with components populated on it. How do I do that? Ah, now that’s the trick question. In the earlier versions of KiCAD that used VRML and X3D format models for the boarda components, you simply couldn’t do it within KiCAD itself. Instead, you had to make sure you had STEP models of all the componentson the board, and then run a converter program called “StepUp” to generate a STEP model of the board that copies and embeds all the STEP models of the components. Then you can import the overall STEP model to MCAD and go from there to do things like visualize a multi-board assembly, design enclosures, and so on.
Alas, one point to keep in mind… with KiCAD, the 3D interface was in bad need of a lot of refactoring, and that turned out to be a lot more work than was expected. KiCAD was reworked to be able to work with STEP models directly, so hopefully exporting a 3D model of your entire board will be quick and painless in future versions of KiCAD. Please note that within this forum there are links to equivalent STEP models of the old KiCAD VRML models, so you can use that as a starting point if you’ve started using the old VRML models to get a 3D visualization of a board.
20200428/DuckDuckGo kicad export 3d model of board
20200428/https://forum.kicad.info/t/how-to-share-step-3d-model-with-all-the-components-on-the-pcb-too/2542
MCAD? It’s a generic term for mechanical CAD, a prime example being FreeCAD. Ah, yes, FreeCAD, we meet again. And right here in the article is an example of an Arduino board being viewed in FreeCAD, exported from Eagle CAD. So it’s not too far of a jump to export from KiCAD instead.
20200428/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FreeCAD
20200428/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Freecad_screenshot_–Arduino(Eagle_import).jpg
And, yes, here again is the dreaded STEP format. It’s not the most ideal format, other than the fact that it’s become standardized.
20200428/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_10303