Altium 23 won't create split plane!? Help please!

[thomasx]

Hi

I am on Altium 23, a 4 layer stackup, signal-plane-plane-signal. All components laid out and time to get started defining split planes.

I select layer 2 and draw the lines to create a split plane. But no split plane is generated. I have tried a lot and tried to figure out why not, but I can't manage. What am I missing?

I tried both drawing a line from pullback to pullback and also to draw an isolated island in the middle of the layer, but everything to no avail.

I noticed that when in 3D mode, the components are shown, but the pcb laminate itself is does not show up. Could that be related. Did I miss something in board planning mode. I mean, the pullbacks are three, right where they should be.

Double clicking on a plane layer does nothing, either before or after I add a split line. It's like Altium doesn't recognize the layer as a plane. But it is set as a plane in the Layer Stack Manager.

Anyone who can point me in the right direction here?

Thanks!

[thomasx]

I found the answer to my problem in this post

https://electronics.stackexchange.com/a/636010/362436

[ajb]

Plane layers are fairly limited and in most cases I think you're better off using a signal layer and placing polygons these days. 

[asmi]

Plane layers are fairly limited and in most cases I think you're better off using a signal layer and placing polygons these days.

The only problem with this approach is Altium's SI simulator only considers planes as references, so if you want to run SI sims (and get at least somewhat sensible results), you will have to use planes.