altium
So I use Altium for designing and on most days a quick restart generally makes things normal. But today Altium refused to start at all.
I could see in task manager multiple instances of Altium though all were frozen.
Any way to get the Altium to run or do I need to uninstall and install the whole thing again?
Also any ideas why such a thing would happen so any mistakes can be avoided in the future?
Thanks!!
Step AP203 does not seem to preserve colors, whereas AP213 does. Not sure about "textures", but neither seem to support transparency. If you're just downloading random 3D files from the internet, maybe they're not exactly in the advertised format.
For the ones that look like blocks, make sure that in the 3D body you've selected "Generic STEP Model" rather than "extruded", and of course you must embed and place it properly.
Edit: with the further information -- You've got a collision there- perhaps you have the highlight color set to gray rather than the typical virulent green. Maybe you've placed the bodies so they intersect the PCB surface. Since you didn't make them - they might be made with a plane not optimal for Altium, and just need to nudged up a hair. Also make sure you reset error markers.
I'm aware of two common reasons for disappearing connections.
View Configurations (shortcut L), make sure you have the "Show" checkbox ticked for "Default Color for New Nets".
PCB panel, make sure that "From-To Editor" is NOT selected.
Best Answer
This happens to me quite frequently. A couple of things to try.
Try opening the workspace directly. If you save your workspace into a specific folder, then use that workspace. On Windows 7 my workspace defaults to C:\Users\sglover\AppData\Roaming\Altium\Altium Designer {B7BBF47B-2F84-45EA-954F-607E59116D16}\LastWorkspace. Yours may be similar.
If that doesn't work then you may need to delete the workspace and all of the temporary files that Altium creates. On my Windows 7 PC these are in 2 places:
The safest way is to rename these Altium folders to "Altium old", then try restarting Altium. You will need to "kill off" any instances of Altium that are still running by using the Task Manager first.