Animate KiCAD PCB in Blender

In the Series "Trying Things Out":

Today I felt like doing something with Blender again, so I thought: why not try animating a KiCAD PCB in Blender? Why? Well… because we can, I suppose. But also because Blender 4.4.3 brought some rendering improvements I wanted to try out—especially the improved denoising. Another day, I’ll probably explore how hard it is to render a beautiful-looking PCB in three.js (last time I checked, the materials all needed to be reworked to look decent). But that’s for a future post.

Here’s the (straightforward) process I followed:

1. Check the electronics 3D models in KiCAD’s PCB editor, and download any missing ones (e.g., from UltraLibrarian).
2. Install the KiCAD plugin pcb2blend and export the PCB.
3. Install the Blender add-on PCB 3D Importer and import the PCB model into Blender.
4. Create the animation in Blender.
   1. The materials were already decent, so I left them as-is.
      I went with a light vertical exploded view, with the camera orbiting around the PCB.
   2. To add atmospheric fog, I followed this great video (and highly recommend Ryan King's YouTube channel in general—it’s packed with useful info and clear explanations).
   3. The text seen in the animation is just Blender’s native text object using the Text Me One font, paired with an Emission shader.

Here’s the result. It took a few hours to render. Sure, it could be improved—with better fog movement, more balanced fog density, and some lighting tweaks—but for a quick test, I think it turned out pretty okay.