Most board designs today incorporate areas of copper, which are easily created in Altium Designer by placing polygon pours. Altium Designer 14.3 brings a number of polygon editing enhancements, which simplify and streamline working with polygons.

The key changes are:

• the introduction of the Unpoured mode, where the polygon is represented by its outline;
• the enhanced editing behavior, providing greatly improved re-shaping capabilities. 

Poured or Unpoured Polygons

Polygons now have an unpoured state. When a polygon is in the unpoured state, it is represented by a thin line that defines its boundary, as shown in the image below.

The same polygon shown poured on the left, and unpoured on the right.

An unpoured polygon can be:

• Reshaped by clicking and dragging on an edge or a vertex, as described below.
• Moved to a new location by clicking and dragging.
• Repoured via the right-click menu, or the Tools » Polygon Pours submenu.
• Unpoured again via the right-click menu, or the Tools » Polygon Pours submenu.
• Automatically repoured, by setting the Polygon Repour option to Always.
• Detected by the Unpoured Polygon design rule (Electrical category). When detected, a message will appear, giving the option to repour any unpoured polygons. If they are left unpoured they will then be highlighted as a rule violation.

Controlling when a Polygon is Automatically Repoured

The automatic repour of polygons is controlled by the Polygon Repour options, located on the PCB Editor — General page of the Preferences dialog.

Set the Polygon Repour option as follows:

• Never - After editing a polygon it switches to Unpoured, and remains in this state until a Repour command is specifically executed. To repour, right click on the polygon and select Polygon Actions » Repour from the right-click menu, or use the commands in the Tools » Polygon Pours submenu. 
• Ask - display a dialog asking the user if they want to repour the unpoured polygon that was just modified by an edit action (shown below).
• Always - Always automatically repour a polygon whenever an edit action occurs.

If polygon repouring is set to Ask, a confirmation dialog will appear whenever a polygon editing action is performed. 

Working with an Unpoured Polygon

An unpoured polygon is represented by a thin outline. In the unpoured state the outline is not an electrical object, that is, it will not cause rule violations such as a clearance or short circuit violation, the outline is displayed so that the designer is aware that the polygon exists and can edit and manipulate the polygon as required. 

To perform an action on an unpoured polygon, such as selecting or double-clicking to edit, click within a few pixels of any edge of the polygon. 

Click within a few pixels of the edge to perform an edit action on an unpoured polygon, as shown above. The green shading is because the unpoured polygon has being detected by the online Unpoured Polygon design rule.

Changing Between Poured and Unpoured

Now that the poured state is simply an attribute of each polygon, it is very easy to switch between poured and unpoured.

You can:

• Toggle the IsPoured checkbox in the Polygon Pour dialog, the PCB Inspector panel, the PCB List panel, or the Polygon Manager.
• Right-click on a polygon and select the appropriate Poured or Unpoured command from the Polygon Actions sub-menu.
• Select the appropriate Poured or Unpoured command in the Tools » Polygon Pours sub-menu.
• Click the Pouring button in the  Polygon Manager and perform a Pour or Unpour action.

Everywhere that supports polygon editing now includes an Is Poured option, toggle this to change the poured state.

Editing the Shape of a Polygonal Object

The shape of a polygon is edited by clicking and dragging on a vertex, or an edge. Note that these edit actions can be performed on both a poured or an unpoured polygon.

To graphically edit the shape of a polygon, click once to select it. The type of edit action is then chosen by hovering the cursor in the appropriate location, and then clicking and dragging when the cursor appears. The animation below shows a variety of edit actions. Press Shift+Spacebar to cycle through the 3 editing styles, then use the green guidelines to help accurately place the vertex. The current mode is displayed in the Heads Up Display, and also on the Status bar.

Hold Ctrl to delete or add a vertex (click and hold briefly until there is a response).

Press Shift+Spacebar to cycle through the 3 editing styles, then use the green guidelines to help accurately place the vertex.

Detecting Unpoured Polygons

To ensure that all polygons are poured, the Unpoured Polygon design rule has been added to Altium Designer's PCB editor. Create and enable an Unpoured Polygon design rule to ensure that unpoured polygons are detected when a DRC is performed. If any unpoured polygons are detected, a Confirm dialog will appear warning that unpoured polgyons have been detected, click Yes to repour them.

Include an Unpoured Polygon design rule to ensure that all polygons are poured before generating output files.

Note the Allow unpoured checkbox, this can be used to permit specific polygons to remain unpoured, if required.

What Happened to Shelving?

With the introduction of the unpoured state for polygons, shelving has been removed. Why?, because while it had strengths, shelving also had weaknesses. The greatest weakness was that you were not aware that a shelved polygon existed, because they were completely invisible. They could not be detected either, which meant it was easy to proceed with the design process without realizing that there were polygons still shelved.

Unpoured polygons bring the best of both worlds. You get no interference from an unpoured polygon, you can freely route and place other design objects in that space, then set the polygon state to Is Poured when you are ready.

The replacement of Shelving with Unpoured has resulted in a number of menu changes in Altium Designer. The images below show the various menus that have been affected.

You will noticed that older menus included numerous Repour commands, whereas the latest menus have Rebuild commands. With the introduction of the Unpoured state, the term Rebuild has replaced the term Repour to describe the process of reanalyzing and recalculating the polygon.

The Tools » Polygon Pours sub-menu: AD14.2 on the left, AD14.3 on the right.
Note that the Convert Hatched Polygon to Solid command has moved to the Legacy sub-menu.

The right-clickPolygon Actions sub-menu: AD14.2 on the left, AD14.3 on the right.

Altium Designer 14.3 includes an additional Polygon Actions right-click sub-menu, this appears when you are not over a polygon.