KiCad ray tracing issue with double-side load

[technix]

Contrast the two renders, the solder side of the board is a lot darker than the component side. The solder side render is already enhanced in my case here, just look at the severely washed out background.

Component side:


Solder side:


How to fix that?

[sethhillbrand]

You can turn off the "floor" on the solder side.  This will make them the same.

[technix]

You can turn off the "floor" on the solder side.  This will make them the same.

Where is that setting?

[Warhawk]

I dealt with this issue too. The problem is that the current version of kicad does not allow setting a different light position.

[hermit]

Preferences > Render Options > Ray Tracing Options > Add Floor  ?

[SiliconWizard]

Instead of making the future renderer overly complicated, it would be nice to have the option of generating a POV-Ray file. We could then further tweak it and render it with POV-Ray.

[MarkS]

The shading model they use is atrocious. It looks like polygonal flat shading with increased polygon subdivision for smoothness. It is almost impossible to tell where the light source is located from those pictures. Behind the camera? The falloff is greatly exaggerated. Anything close to the camera (light source) is significantly brighter than objects just ever so slightly farther away. The distances shown shouldn't result in that degree of light attenuation.

Maybe a bug report is in order?

[Doctorandus_P]

To me it looks like at least half of the perceived difference is just an optical illusion because of the big black connectors on the bottom side.
This optical illusion is enhanced more by light connector on the top and more dark areas on the bottom.

The difference (in the green) between the center and edges of the PCB is also already more pronounced than the difference between top & bottom.

The goal of KiCad's 3D rendering is also to give a visual impression and spot errors on the PCB easily, for example SMD parts on the wrong side, or mirror image text. Such things are easy to spot in the 3D view, but can be hard on the 2D top view of the PCB.
For any practical purpose the 3D renders look plenty good to me.

If you want photo quality renders, it migt be a better choice to use step-up to export the 3D representation and use external software that is more specialised for this kind of thing.

Adding solder fillets would also make a much more appealing 3D view, and they may even be usefull if they are volumetric correct from the stencil thickness & holes. And of course you also want to see how much solder is sucked up by those via through pad holes, and the solder dripping off on the other side...
 As far as I know KiCad has no support for tented / plugged vias yet, and those features would also be usefull to inspect on a 3D render, but do not need photo quality renders.

KiCad has been improving quite rapidly in the last few years, and the rate only seems to be accelerating. Maybe the desiners have some time for thinks like this in 4 or 5 years but for the time being there is still plenty to do in polishing the overall gui and adding sometimes even basic functionality.
http://docs.kicad-pcb.org/doxygen/v6_road_map.html

[chrisc]

Instead of making the future renderer overly complicated, it would be nice to have the option of generating a POV-Ray file. We could then further tweak it and render it with POV-Ray.

I’m thinking of moving to KiCad at some point (still use DipTrace) and was thinking of the possibility of a direct or indirect integration of POV-Ray as it combines two of my interests.

I have a pretty good understanding of how POV works (given I wrote a decent amount of it over the last 25 years). Generating a scene file is always a good fallback option but I’m thinking of maybe a closer integration that avoids the need to tweak in the first place. If there’s sufficient interest in this I’ll take a closer look at what’s involved.

[SiliconWizard]

Instead of making the future renderer overly complicated, it would be nice to have the option of generating a POV-Ray file. We could then further tweak it and render it with POV-Ray.

I’m thinking of moving to KiCad at some point (still use DipTrace) and was thinking of the possibility of a direct or indirect integration of POV-Ray as it combines two of my interests.

I have a pretty good understanding of how POV works (given I wrote a decent amount of it over the last 25 years). Generating a scene file is always a good fallback option but I’m thinking of maybe a closer integration that avoids the need to tweak in the first place. If there’s sufficient interest in this I’ll take a closer look at what’s involved.

That would be great.

Generating a POV scene file would be pretty cool already though. We could then use POV-Ray functionalities to change lighting, camera, make animations... without the need to again overly complicate the integration. The default scene would render as it looks in the integrated 3D viewer (only better), without any tweak needed, but we could then also modify the scene if we so wish.