Development Highlight: 3D Viewer Improvements

A small quality of life improvement, Fabien Corona in MR#63 added the ability for the 3D viewer to use the board soldermask and silkscreen colors as defined in PCBNew just like the title of the merge request implies 😀

A subtle change has been made in MR#405 by Mario Luzeiro that affects how copper is rendered. The visual difference between plated copper pads and non-plated copper pads will now be visible as well as copper in general.

This image shows a ENIG plated copper hole compared to the surrounding copper traces when the soldermask was turned off.

A utility feature was added to adjust the opacity of 3D models that can aid in mechanical design previews with a simple slider MR#188 Mario Luzeiro in

Up until now, raytracing used a fixed light source during rendering. MR#188 by Mario Luzeiro adds light source configuration to the options dialog that allows customization.

Oleg Endo was unhappy with the rendering performance of the 3D viewer which on his system exhibited frames per second rendering times as slow as 10 FPS. After his changes in MR#145 rendering speeds may be up to 8x faster as before.

The floor plane object that is optional to add in the 3D Viewer previously cast a shadow onto the bottom side of the board. Emery Burhan in MR#170 submitted a patch to disable the casting of shadow by the floor object to give the PCB a more uniform look.

Bottom of board before floor reflection:

Bottom of board after floor reflection:

Emery Burhan in MR#171 added the ability to set an "animation speed" when toggling between board views with hotkeys.

Now the camera animation speed can be adjusted by a slider which can be found in the options dialog.

The slowest speed of 1 looks like this

The fastest speed of 5 looks like this