Have you ever wanted to see how some of your electronic projects would look before you actually get to build them? This post will show you how to create really good-looking 3D renderings 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: your PCB design created with Cadsoft (now Autodesk) EAGLE is converted to a POV-Ray source file with a script. POV-Ray uses ray tracing, a rendering technique for generating an image by tracing the path of light as pixels in an image plane and simulating the effects of its encounters with virtual objects.
This is an old post that I decided to update in 2020. Unfortunately, this method was never too popular and required software is now out of date and hard to find. Most of the links are dead by now. Meanwhile, the most important software, Cadsoft EAGLE was bought by Autodesk and included in Fusion 360. Fortunately, I was able to find an official download link for EAGLE 7.4.0, released in 2015. Everything will be done in a Windows 7 virtual machine.
Arduino Mega rendered with POV-Ray