KB: Convert a Fill or Region into a Polygon

Altium Designer Altium Designer
If you need to convert a fill or region into a polygon in Altium Designer, the "Convert to Polygon" command won't work directly since it only recognizes tracks, arcs, and lines. This article provides a workaround that creates a temporary polygon around your fill, explodes it to free primitives, and reconstructs it as a proper polygon using track-based outlines.

Solution Details

The Convert to Polygon command only works when tracks / arcs / lines / etc... are highlighted, other primitives such as Fills / regions / etc... are not considered as enclosed primitives, so the command would not work for these objects. You would need to recreate the shape using tracks.

A workaround is to:

1. Create a polygon around the fill
2. Create a design rule for clearance of Polygons to be 0, you would want the polygon to pour as close as possible to the fill
3. Open the properties for the Polygon and set the Pour properties to None
4. Repour the polygon, this should create an outline of your polygon
5. From here, go to: Tools » Convert » Explode Polygon to Free Primitives
6. Delete your fill, you should see an outline remain
7. Select the tracks of the remaining outline
8. Run the Tools » Convert » Create Polygon
9. Delete the remaining outlines
10. Remember to delete the Polygon clearance rule.

Here's documentation that may be of interest:

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