What does this add?

[marcdraco]

I know I might sound like an old farty here but I failed to get this to work until I downloaded your importer and after all the fooling around with text markers, what came out of Blender was nothing like what came out of PCB New.

But more than that, PCB New already has this function and while it's buggy, it works directly in Blender with the existing import/export, it's faster as a result and you just export the board directly.

I'm a developer myself so I'm cognisant of people just jumping in and complaining. I'm honesty confused why you did this rather than extend the existing exporter? Multi-stacks perhaps?

The only issue I had with the existing export in PCB New is it's necessary to join all the parts into one to to transforms because each object has its own origin. Honestly man, I'm not taking pop, I'm just confused.

[30350n]

KiCad 3D Viewer:

Blender import (without pcb2blender, VRML format):

Blender import using pcb2blender:

(Both Blender screenshots are straight out of import, the only thing I added is a HDRI for lighting. The pcb2blender render took approximately twice as long to run, compared to the KiCad render (~3s vs ~6s on a 9 year old gpu), which for the increase in quality is more than fine).

I downloaded your importer and after all the fooling around with text markers

If you are only exporting a single (non panelized) PCB, you can just skip that.

I'm honesty confused why you did this rather than extend the existing exporter?

What "exporter"?

The only issue I had with the existing export in PCB New is it's necessary to join all the parts into one to to transforms because each object has its own origin.

That's more of a feature than an issue, the main problem here is that Blender's VRML importer doesn't join each individual part (which might consist of multiple face sets) together. pcb2blender fixes this.

[30350n]

Did that sufficiently answer your questions?