Render 3D realistic images of EAGLE circuit boards

Did you ever wanted to see how some of your electronic projects would look before you actually build it? This post will show you how to create realistic images of your PCB designs that you can use in presentations, websites or only to get an idea of how it will look.

The process is the following: you design a PCB using CadSoft EAGLE. Then, the Eagle3D script converts the EAGLE PCB file into a POV-Ray source. This is then rendered into something like below. POV-Ray is a very high quality and very configurable renderer. To make an idea of what ic can do with the right input, see the hall of fame of images rendered with it.

There is also a video version of this and some new improvements in: [Video] Render 3D images of EAGLE PCB projects.

This post will describe:

• How to compile POV-Ray (at the time of writing this there were no Ubuntu packages, you can now install from repositories).
• How to use HDRI lighting to improve the quality of the rendered pictures.
• How to compile MegaPOV, a modified version of POV-Ray 3.6.

Read more »