I’ve been putting off using Blender since over 5 years, being intimidated by the complex UI and workflow, until this month when I mustered courage to go through Andrew Price’s Doughnut tutorials. My aim was to learn how to do photo-realistic renders of KiCad boards.
Unfortunately, KiCad ray trace option does not allow setting lighting, floor and other scene parameters, hence Blender. So the next step was to export VRML and STEP file models from KiCad.
I ran another test by using KiCad StepUp Tools workbench in FreeCAD to import the Board with parts and Copper + Silk layers. Once again, the result was the same – the mask openings do not show up as in the pic below.
According to @maui in this thread on the KiCad forum, from Blender version 2.8 onward, the WRL/X3D importer has been changed causing the lack of color/texture import.
Opening the KiCad VRML file in Meshlab produces expected results.
A workaround to this that I stumbled upon is to use the online 3D file format converter at CADexchanger and convert the KiCad VRML file to Collada DAE format. Importing the DAE format in Blender results in glorious color renders.
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