PCB Import from Altium designer 18 (.STEP) is slooow

[Anonymous]

Hi there,
When I try to import a PCB with about 250 components it takes an insane amount of time, both to import and to manipulate with the move command. The lag is mostly minutes. I have a 6 months old PC  /w i7 6700 -8 cores and a Nvidia Quadro P1000 graphics card. Windows 7.  What can be done?

Best regards
/Thom

[Phil.E]

Hi,

Can you possibly share the model? 250 components should not be that heavy for Fusion. I'd like to profile the performance on a test machine. If you don't want to share in public, I can send an email.

By chance, do you have component color cycling turned on?

Thanks,

[Anonymous]

Hi,

No, no color cycling active for these models. There are two different PCB variants. Each differs in connector style and user interface.

Can I send the .step models directly to you via mail or Dropbox?

Tomorrow I'm going out of town for the holidays so I will have very limited or no access to my account and email until after new year.

Best Regards

/Thom

[Phil.E]

@Anonymous Look for an email. If this waits until the new year that's fine. Glad to take a look whenever you can send it.

Regards,

[stringwringler]

Thanks, I've sent you one of the "offending" files for examination.

Good luck 🙂

/Thom

PS, In case you wonder who this guy is; this is my private home account.

DS.

[Anonymous]

Same here. When importing this PCB designed in Altium 18.0.9:

 

the import runs fine, and opening the imported file is 'normal speed'; a few seconds, maybe a little longer the first time.Inserting this PCB in another design is quick too.

But trying to rotate the PCB 90 degrees by selecting the component, select 'Move/rotate' and entering -90 degrees for the X axis rotate takes 18 minutes on an Core i7 with Fusion taking up 25% CPU (1 core) during the entire operation. This design contains less than 100 components and as you can see most of them are not very heavily detailed.

Note: the copper/silk pattern is a PNG image in an attached canvas. Trying a decal on the 'board' body gives weird artifacts with the decal contracting around the holes.

I am willing to share the STEP with someone from Autodesk, if that helps. Just let me know where to send it.

[Phil.E]

@Anonymous

Look for an email shortly. Thanks for helping.

Regards,

[l_wcrenshaw]

I've always found that imported PCBs from Altium (regardless of version) causes F360's move command to become very sluggish.  The UI of the move command is great, but the UE less so b/c it gets bogged very easily based on my experience.  I have a number of designs where I have to save individual components as separate files b/c the main assembly with PCBs is unusable when I try to manipulate objects (show/hide doesn't seem to help...  I always assumed this should behave like suppress in SW, but maybe not).  For instance, I have a particular design where I'm trying to determine how to integrate some packaging that will be stowed in its drawers.  The main assembly is too sluggish to manipulate, so I saved the drawers as separate files and work w/I that part only so I don't spend time waiting for F360 to catch up.  I'm running a new, fully spec'd 15" MBP FWIW.

[Anonymous]

A year ago or so I imported two PCB's with more than 6000 components in total in Fusion and positioned them in the housing. Altium Designer 16 went on it's knees with those designs giving us an hour of work time before it exhausted the available memory. Solidworks did the import fine but actually working with the designs was close to impossible. In Fusion all went well. It took a while to import and load the STEP's, but that was it.

Thus, the extremely sluggish performance / long 'thinking times' have not always been there. Must be either related to newer versions of Altium Designer, newer versions of Fusion360, or a combination of both. After all, Altium Designer 18 is a huge update. They went from a mostly 32-bit single-threaded Borland Delphi codebase to mostly 64-bit multi-threaded .NET. That might have caused some trouble here and there. 

But I think most of it is in Fusion360. I tried opening an older design (december 2015, probably once exported from Altium Designer 16) from the data panel:

Move/rotate of the PCB is better; rotating does not take 18 minutes, but 'only' a mere 50 seconds or so....

Note: I did not re-import the STEP, I just opened the design.

The PC is an Alienware 17 laptop. Windows 10, SSD, Core I7-4710, 16GB RAM, nVidia GTX860M graphics adapter, latest driver.

[l_wcrenshaw]

You may want to try exporting the parasolid model from Altium as well - worth a try.  Brave move migrating to Altium 18 so soon after release.  I'm going to wait for a few projects to wrap up this winter before I pull the trigger.

[Phil.E]

@Anonymous

Did you get my email? I'd like to look at a couple of your files if you don't mind. Perhaps one of the new STEP files from Altium and the older design you mention, so I can compare.

@l_wcrenshaw

Thanks for your observations.

Regards,

[Phil.E]

@Anonymous

Your model has 33990 faces, bodies, edges and components. (total selection available)

32797 are faces alone.

Looking at the model, it's extremely detailed. There are probably many thousands of details that are present that do very little for your design. For instance, each component has a 3D text reference on top. These all add many faces and edges. The ICs have fully detailed legs, dozens of them. It all adds up.

I'm not sure yet if this is new. Fusion has never done well with this much detail. Is it possible you are now exporting Altium models with a high degree of detail, more so than before?

Is there any way to reduce the detail in these models? For instance, I would delete almost all of the components on this board for a mechanical model. The readout and wire connections look like the only board components that matter to the mechanical design. (unless you just want to render realistic images of the board assembly). Long before 3D circuit boards, I would have to do this cleanup in AutoCAD, deleting thousands of blocks for stuff that did not matter to my mechanical assembly, leaving the connectors and things that bolt to heatsinks.

Sorry I don't have a better answer. Reducing details is the only way around this. Please let me know if you have more questions.

Thanks,

[Anonymous]

Phil,

I replied to your mail and included a link to a ZIP containing the STEP and .f3d of the first design.

I will send you another one with the shared design of the older one.

[edit]

Two mails have been sent to your phil.eichmiller mail address, one yesterday at 08.48, one today at 09.05

[/edit]

Regarding the move to Altium 18: Personal projects are ultimately suitable to give such new software a workout before applying it to 'real designs'. So far I am quite happy with it; AD17 is unstable as hell with large designs and a constant struggle with the orange and red squares in the right bottom. AD18 behaves much better although I have the impression that the final release is much slower than the earlier betas.

[Anonymous]

Hi,

Back on the office again after the holidays. Not the answer I wanted really but I see your point. Unfortunately this is the models we have in the library as for now and reworking the library is not an easy undertaking considering the effort involved. If we turn our attention to possible workarounds, what could that be? Would converting the complex hierarcical component (PCB) /w subparts to a single body make any difference? Or a BREP perhaps?

Best regards /Thom

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@Phil.E wrote:

@Anonymous

Your model has 33990 faces, bodies, edges and components. (total selection available)

32797 are faces alone.

Looking at the model, it's extremely detailed. There are probably many thousands of details that are present that do very little for your design. For instance, each component has a 3D text reference on top. These all add many faces and edges. The ICs have fully detailed legs, dozens of them. It all adds up.

I'm not sure yet if this is new. Fusion has never done well with this much detail. Is it possible you are now exporting Altium models with a high degree of detail, more so than before?

Is there any way to reduce the detail in these models? For instance, I would delete almost all of the components on this board for a mechanical model. The readout and wire connections look like the only board components that matter to the mechanical design. (unless you just want to render realistic images of the board assembly). Long before 3D circuit boards, I would have to do this cleanup in AutoCAD, deleting thousands of blocks for stuff that did not matter to my mechanical assembly, leaving the connectors and things that bolt to heatsinks.

Sorry I don't have a better answer. Reducing details is the only way around this. Please let me know if you have more questions.

Thanks,

---

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[schneik-adsk]

I have a video on how to make this usable. It shows the board PCB13268 it it OK to post the video here to the forum?

[Phil.E]

Thanks Kevin. 

@Anonymous

Looking at your model(s) there is a distinct lack of details that are seen in @Anonymous 's files. His components all have 3D text modeled on them, yours have none. You mentioned that the circular design is an older one.

Is it possible that Altium is now exporting with vastly greater amounts of detail, such as the text references? Is it possible to reduce this in Altium by picking output options that leave out 3D text?

Thanks,

[Anonymous]

Hi Kevin,

Yes, it's ok. I'm excited to see what you have found.

Best regards /Thom

[Anonymous]

There is an options dialog in the export tool in AD18:

Up to now I have used STEP format only and the default 3D bodies option (Export both). I tried to export with the "Prefer simple bodies" but this did not make any visible difference on the appearence after import into Fusion. A few more 3D formats exist;

- PARASOLID

- DXF/DWG

- PDF3D

Import of parasolid did not produce any noticable differences from STEP. Pulling one of the transform arrows in move mode makes Fusion sit and think for more than 10 minutes.

PDF3D does not seem to be interpreted correct by Fusion on import.

I have yet to try the DXF/DWG format but i doubt this will be any different.

Best regards /Thom

[Anonymous]

Hi Phil,

Modelling detail is always a balance act. Customers really dig the highly detailed 3D views (and they pay the bills), but a high level of detail quickly makes the designs unworkable in MCAD software. Nowadays I prefer detailed models for connectors, LEDs, switches, displays, etc., but no so much for things like IC's and capacitors. They only need a realistic volume claim.

Altium has a simple approach to 3D models/views: you can place 3D data on a mechanical layer. Altium does not modify any of it, it just meshes and displays it while keeping the original STEP (brep?) data in the .PcbLib file. It also remeshes the data every time you load the project.

During an export the 3D data of the component is just 'included' in the final output with updated translation/rotation. Altium does not render texts or similar in a STEP output.

AD18 does not behave differently. So far I have not yet seen any differences in exported detail between AD16/17 and AD18. Also, it makes no difference in Fusion; STEP-models from either version of Altium Designer are equally slow in Fusion nowadays. This used to be different.

It seems that mainly the Move command is slow. If I draw a cylinder through many PCB components (Create->Cylinder->choose plane->choose radius->choose height), and execute 'Cut', the boolean result is there almost instantly. This is a much more computationally intensive operation than a simple move/rotate.

[schneik-adsk · Accepted solution]

a few tricks to reduce PCB complexity.