The key topic we will be focusing on is creating context to give your designs a clear and engaging visual narrative.

It’s possible to add luminous materials which work well for LEDs.In today's blog we'll be providing some useful tips for rendering your designs in Fusion 360. Adjusting reflectivity of the PCB materials can help achieve a glassy or more textured look.

With the setup done, it’s now really easy to render multiple angles of your board with complex lighting and background capabilities. To ensure any through holes and the edges fit in, you can use a third material set to the colour of the soldermask/surface finish. The offset is usually around -½ * the length of the PCB along that axis. Finally using the offset values move the texture so it lines up with the physical board below. Once the image of the material is selected, set the sample size to the dimensions of the PCB this ensures the scale is correct. Each face will require its own material – you can create these by duplicating the included FR4 material and changing them to images as below. With the two graphics prepared you can now move over to Fusion 360 and open the appearance window in the PCB model. I’ve found that a DPI of 600 works well (though less may be acceptable). The vectors can be rasterised with the Inkscape command: inkscape -d -e '/file/to/output.png' '/file/to/input.svg' svg files, one for each side of the board. The -L flag means the program will only generate graphics for the top and bottom layers, not each individual layer.

To indicate this, the command must be entered as below: tracespace -L -o '/path/to/output/' '/path/to/input/*.*' The input here is a directory containing all the gerbers and drill files.

Rendering in fusion 360