Rendering of a PCB: life is really hard

[BlackIoT]

Hi,

this is my experience with PCB rendering.

I push the board from Eagle to Fusion 360, the board opens in 3D PCB mode (DESIGN mode is no more available).

From 3D PCB I move in RENDER.

The board is perfect, with his top and bottom canvas at their place.

I press IN-CANVAS RENDER: the rendering starts and the canvas disappear. Stop rendering.

I know canvas cannot be used in rendering (why ???), I must add them as decals.

There is no more the option to add decals from RENDER, neither from 3D PCB (and DESIGN mode is no more available with a PCB produced by EAGLE).

Export the board as a STEP and import back the STEP. Thanks God now I have DESIGN mode back again.

Adding manually the decal that I have obtained exporting image from MANUFACTURING of EAGLE.

The decal is about 50% of the PCB. Why ? I have exported/imported the image and the PCB without scaling, the decal should be exactly of the same size.

The decal over the PCB is deformed because CHAIN FACES is ON (why ??? the PCB is flat !!!).

Uncheck CHAIN FACES, all becomes blue, as if everything was selected.

No way to remove the blue selection, you must work with boring and details hiding blue active. Why ???

Here starts the real mess: scale the decal changing the scale factor. As you write the scaling value in his text box it changes immediately, so starts an infinite series of attempts: 1.1... 0.95... 10.02... 0.98.. 0.99 move up... move left... 0.99 move down...

You go on until, at some points, it seems the the decal fits more or less acceptably. No way to work with numbers in order to have the exact scaling and positioning. The decal positioning is the result of an empirical and non-repetitive way of proceeding.

At this point I wasted a lot of time to get a just satisfactory result when the tool should have done it precisely and instantly. The joke is that the canvases were perfect when I pushed the project from EAGLE.

I'd like to have the professional way to proceed: after pushing from EAGLE to FUSION 360 you start a rendering process, the canvas of the PCB stay there and the final result includes them, as it should.

About manual decal application.Is it possible to remove the blue when you uncheck CHAIN FACES ?

When you change the scale factor, is possible apply it with an Apply button instead of it automatically as you update the text box ?

I'm sure that people that use this tools every day, for the whole day, like me, really appreciate an effort to solve this really boring defects, because it means to waste a lot of time for each rendering, just because the tool is buggy.

Thanks a lot.

Claudio

[BlackIoT]

I forgot to say that when you update the file used as a decal you have to rename it every time, because if you ask Fusion 360 to replace the decal file, and this has the same name as the previous one, the tool keeps the old one. This is a bug.