Hey folks -
I’ve recently started having trouble with constraints in Inventor on hidden surfaces. While I can’t confirm, I swear I used to be able to set a constraint onto a hidden surface and now I cannot. My specific example relates to a C-Channel. The C-Channel itself is visible, but inside the part there are circle sketches, extruded into surfaces to help align parts. The repeated patterns are set to “Hide All Surfaces”. If I make them visible, I can then select the edges of the circular extrusion when setting contraints in the assembly. When I hide them, I cannot. Is there a way to not have them visible in an assembly but still use them when setting constraints? I have read 20-30 posts here and on Autodesk’s site that have seemed promising but then have not helped.
Thanks for any advice!
As far as I know the surfaces must be visible.
I’m not sure if this is exactly what you are looking for but you can try:
View → Object Visibility → Enable all work features
This turns all the inner extruded holes to visible. Then allowing you to constrain all necessary parts and when you need to display this CAD using the same button this can be disabled.
I understand this isn’t exactly what you’re looking for but it might be a quick way to achieve everything you need without going into each individual channel.
This isn’t quite what I was looking for but is the first improvement I’ve had in HOURS of digging. Thank you – this is at least a viable workaround for what I was doing (setting every darn channel every time). It’s possible that I imagined I could do it before…
I can imagine how painful this can be - happy to hear I was able to help!
Still playing with it, but in many ways this solution is better than what I wanted. The only time I really don’t want them there is if I’m animating or screenshotting, so this is great. Thanks again!
I don’t remember offhand if this method will allow you to select hidden features, but try hovering your cursor in the vicinity of the desired hidden feature. A menu should appear allowing you to finely select a specific feature.