I’m trying out Quilter for the first time, I love the concept! Nice UI and workflow too.
I was able to get numerous candidate layouts based on a schematic and board file I provided. When I download a layout candidate, it looks reasonable in 2D view but the 3D view looks very odd: there is no “board” itself, only traces, and some of the 3D bodies for components are sitting way off to the side.
Is this a known issue? Is there anything I can do differently on my end to avoid this?
This is in Altium by the way.
Hi @miguel!
I took a look at one of the candidate files (candidate 22 in particular). I am seeing the board outline show up OK on my end (I am using the latest version of Altium - 24.1.2). I did a bit of googling and came across a similar issue here: board - Altium not showing PCB's body in 3D view - Electrical Engineering Stack Exchange - perhaps you can try the suggested there?
One known issue that we do have here is that Quilter still doesn’t move the 3D component bodies to match what happened to the footprints. So you still see the 3D bodies off the board, and in strange places. This is on our roadmap to fix (unfortunately Altium handles positioning for 2D footprints and 3D bodies in separate locations in their file format). We’ll get that fixed!
That said, it shouldn’t prevent you from being able to manufacture the board. The 3D body locations won’t impact the actual gerber / fab files you generate.
@miguel just added an idea to our Ideas board, feel free to upvote it along with any other thoughts you have for how to improve Quilter!
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Thanks for the quick reply and suggestions!
One of the suggestion from that Stack Exchange was successful in fixing the missing board in 3D.
One thing I stumbled across while poking around: it appears the layer stackup was modified by Quilter. See the attached images showing the original and Quilter-ized stackups. Hope this is also something you can also put on your roadmap to fix.
Good to know about the 3D bodies not moving yet. Definitely agree the board is still manufacturable, but integration with my mechanical team does require accurate 3D representation in Altium, so I’m glad this is on your radar.
Best,
Miguel
Great catch on the stack-up changes! We do attempt multiple layer counts altogether - so Quilter will try a 2, 4, 6, 8 layer board as appropriate and show you all of the options - and with that we do intentionally export that new stackup to altium, but I think we are not carrying enough information from what you already had there back to the output. Will definitely add this to the improvements list!
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