Skip to content

README.md

Latest commit

 

History

History
42 lines (33 loc) · 2.25 KB

README.md

File metadata and controls

42 lines (33 loc) · 2.25 KB
Raw

Board3DViewer

An interactive 3D viewer for Altium PCB documents, built as an ASP.NET Blazor Server application. Pick one of the bundled boards and the server renders it to a glTF model with OriginalCircuit.Altium.Rendering.Gltf and streams it to a small WebGL scene in the browser.

dotnet run --project examples/Board3DViewer

Then open the printed URL (e.g. http://localhost:5187), choose a board from the dropdown, and toggle individual features — the substrate, each copper layer, the solder mask, silkscreen, drills, and the placed component 3D bodies — using the checkboxes. Drag to rotate, scroll to zoom, right-drag to pan.

How it works

  • Pure .NET on the server. BoardLibrary finds the repo's TestData/*.PcbDoc boards and renders each one to a binary glTF (.glb) on demand with GltfRenderer, caching the bytes. The GET /board.glb?name=… minimal-API endpoint streams the result.
  • Blazor owns the UI. Components/Pages/Home.razor is an interactive server component: the model picker and the per-feature layer-toggle panel are Blazor state, driving the WebGL scene through JS interop (init / loadModel / setLayerVisible).
  • three.js is the only client-side piece, loaded straight from a CDN via the import map in Components/App.razor. There is no Node, npm, or Python in the build or at runtime — the whole app is built and run by dotnet.

Rendering notes

The viewer (wwwroot/board-viewer.js) is set up to show the board's true colours, which matters because the glTF stores physically-correct linear PBR materials:

  • ACES filmic tone mapping + sRGB output, so dark IC bodies stay dark and the greens/golds stay saturated instead of washing out under flat ambient light.
  • An image-based environment (a neutral room, pre-filtered for PBR). This is what makes the metallic surfaces — the ENIG gold finish, connector shells, component leads — read as bright and shiny: a metal with no environment to reflect renders nearly black, which is why a plain directional-light setup looks dull.

For a non-interactive, file-based export of the same model (for Blender, Windows 3D Viewer, etc.), see ExportBoardGltf.