[Mark] wrote in, eager to show off this new tool he’s created to view your gerber files in 3d. He also wrote an instructible to go along with it, to help you figure out how to use the tool. Being an in-browser tool also means you can shoot it to your friends for a quick 3d review as well. Some of you may not feel that the 3d view is that helpful to the process, but we think that this is a welcomed feature that just might get some use around here.
[Mark] points out that it is still being actively developed, so please shoot him bugs via the form on the website if you should encounter any.
Doesn’t work with my gerber files 🙁
If your gerbers don’t work get a copy of gerbv, load your layers then export them as rs247x. Suddenly it works… very nicely! Just curious, where did your gerbers come from? Mine came from protel99se.
Wow! This is AWESOME! Soo much better than trying to view gerber files layer by layer.
A viewer that gives you some ‘realistic’ view of gerber files is useful with or without actual 3D-ness. I spent quite a bit of time trying to get gerbv layer colors and color mixing to look even approximately real, and I’m still not very happy with the results. If the same graphics tool that models soldermask transparency and copper opacity gives you 3D as well (which is probably not unlikely), I don’t see a problem with that!
examples crash firefox 11.0 on Win7
I’m look at the demo models in Firefox 11 on Windows 7 64-bit without any issues.
It’s probably the configuration of WebGL in your installation of Firefox. IIRC the Firefox installer has a blacklist of certain video cards and driver versions and disables WebGL out of the box accordingly.
As the demo site says: “you may have to force enable WebGL”.
Crashes also Firefox 11.0 on WinXP. How to “force enable WebGL”?
Neat. I will definitely watch this evolve. I got it to work. Kind-of on a couple of smaller designs – although I must not specify routed boards in a way it likes. It completely fell apart (and caused Firefox to consume inordinate amounts of memory) on moderate 2-layer design.
Not to take away from the great work that Mark has done here, another very usable web-based 2D viewer can be found at http://www.circuitpeople.com.
I would like it if somebody made a non-buggy, non-laggy gerber editor. Forget 3D, could we have a working 2D version?
KiCAD has had a 3D viewer for a very long time.
Not for gerbers though, right?
That’s right. It models the PCB and components in 3D.
Really neat. I like!
A handful of my Eagle-generated Gerbers that I’ve send for production previously worked just fine running on the most recent Chrome.
If definitely seems like a good complement to the EagleUP package.
I hate to say it, but this destroys circuit people’s offering, and I thought that was pretty damned handy.
Is there a way to import the 3D model in to a tool like Solidworks, Autocad, or Sketch up?
3D model export is in the works 😉
Awesome! It would be super awesome if I could store my files on your servers and have a link to share it.
You can do store and share on CircuitPeople.com (so maybe my work isn’t quite dead yet).
The 3D viewer is great — maybe I’ll add that to CP!
The bottom line here is that the process for making PCBs is photo-lithography, and it’s done layer-by-layer (I’m talking commercial fabrication here). So a 3D image is fun, but not really useful for design checks (aka. “getting what you expect”).
thank you