Altium: Vias

Altium: Vias

This drove me nuts for a whole morning. Normally when stitching ground planes with vias, you would not have thermal relief because these holes are just plated through and not soldered. By default, all vias have thermals so you need to change this by creating a new design rule.

Design -> Rules -> Plane -> Polygon Connect Style
Create a new rule (eg. PolygonConnect_Via)
Under Full Query, enter “IsVia”
Set Connect Style to “Direct Connect”

Pretty straightforward, right? The annoying part is that the query builder doesn’t give you an IsVia option, just a bunch of useless ones. You often must enter queries manually because the correct option isn’t given. Another example is when setting a polygon clearance. By default the clearance rules were a bit challenging for my PulsarProFX to deal with, so I increased it with:

Design -> Rules -> Electrical -> Clearance
Create a new rule (eg. Clearance_Pour)
Under Full Query, enter “InPoly”
Set minimum clearance to something manageable, like “20mil”

In this case, “InPoly” is nowhere to be found (other than in the online documentation), and “IsPoly” absolutely does not do what you want.

from: http://tumblr.tristesse.org/post/996101438/altium-vias