Altium Rendering Issue

Owned by Brahm Soltes
Jul 30, 2023
2 min read

While working in Altium (ver. 21.8.1) using parts created from the IPC Compliant Footprint Wizard, I've encountered an issue where in the 3D view of the PCB, the created parts appear as a gray box. This box is still dimensionally accurate and doesn't affect the layout or routing of the board, but it is ugly to look at and when pictures of the board are needed for reports/presentations etc. Here is an example of what I'm talking about

I have not found a permanent solution to this (yet!), but there is a temporary one. What can be done is selecting all of the components (Shift + click to choose multiple), right clicking and selecting "Component Actions > Update Selected Components from PCB Libraries" as shown below 

The following window will show up, press OK (you can make sure that the 3D body layers are selected but no harm in selecting all). The next window will show all of the components that you selected and what differences they have with their footprints stored on the server (or wherever the footprint is saved).

Make sure that all the components are checked to update and then click "Accept Changes (Create ECO)", and then "Execute Changes" on the follow ECO window. Another window might pop up and click OK. You can now close the ECO and the components should have their correct 3D models on the board.

This looks good now! But if you close and reopen Altium (even with saving to server!) the gray boxes will return. I do not know the root cause of this issue, because the correct models are obviously there, and you can go to the component or footprint in the library on the server and they are there. But for some reason this happens anyway.

I suspect it has something to do with the footprint wizard since all of those components were made using that. The vertical connectors pictured were made manually (using a STEP file on the manufacturer's website) and those persist through Altium restarts. I've tried looking this issue up online extensively, but I have not found anyone with the same issue (or I'm not using the correct search terms). The only other forum post I found with it is here, but there are no replies on it (as of today 11/7/2021). If anyone finds a permanent solution to this, please update this page