Licensing
There are both licensed and unlicensed versions of the 3D PCB Viewer application. In the unlicensed version, the features that require a license are displayed dim to indicate that they are unavailable.
Launching the 3D PCB Viewer
The 3D PCB Viewer uses OpenGL to display 3D graphics. X servers that do not support remote OpenGL displays cannot render graphics generated by the 3D PCB Viewer. For Exceed, only recent versions with a 3D display option can remotely display OpenGL graphics. Even in this case, performance can be slow because of the lack of hardware graphics acceleration. Therefore, Mentor Graphics recommends always running 3D PCB Viewer on the local display rather than remotely through an X server.
Select View> 3D View> Snapshot View / Dynamic View with a PCB or a panel design open in PADS Layout.
If you select Snapshot View, a new instance of 3D PCB Viewer window is opened and it displays the 3D image of the current snapshot of PADS Layout design. Changes made in PADS Layout are not passed to the open 3D Viewer window.
When you select Dynamic View, 3D PCB Viewer automatically reads physical design information from the PCB layout application. For this reason, the design displayed in 3D PCB Viewer is automatically updated with any changes made in layout.