The PCB Design Professionals

3D – 08

Viewing your PCB in 3D in Altium is as easy as, well… 1 2 “3″. All you have to do is press the number “3″ or go to “View” then Switch “To 3D”. To return back to 2D (you guessed it) press “2″.

Once you have your 3D view you will probably want to zoom around the components pretending you can fly.

To Move in 3D you can:

Zoom: Press both mouse buttons together and move the mouse forward and back, or hold “CTRL” and use the scroll wheel on the mouse.

Pan: Scroll wheel pans along the the X axis and “SHIFT+Scroll Wheel” and along the Y axis. (Hold down the right mouse button to drag the screen with the hand tool).

Hold down the shift key to show the navigation ball, (shown in “Image 3″)  then you can right click anywhere on the screen to rotate your PCB on all axis. The navigation ball also has four arrows and a circle. Right clicking on any of these will allow you to lock the rotation to that axis only.

Press “V” to bring up the view options where there are a number of different choices. A few of the really handy ones are “V” then “B” this flips the board, “0″ (Zero) will return your view to 0 degrees, Pressing “9″ will change the view to 90 degrees and finally press “2″ to go back into 2D mode.

So that was viewing your PCB in 3D, the next post will be about defining the 3D attributes for your components.

If you have any questions or you would like us to do a tips and tricks on a specific topic, post a comment or email us at blog@blackstick.co.uk