Hide a single face or other geometry

[carloquinonez]

I'd like to be able to hide a faces on a body. For instance, if you're designing a manifold for multiple solenoid valves, it would be nice to hide one of the faces to see all the internal ducting inside the valve manifold.

 The way this was implemented in CATIA was, basically, by having an alternate display layer. Normally, the view only showed what was on the default layer, but you could also show the hidden layer or both if you wanted to. CATIA only had a 2 layers, but I'm sure multiple layers would be useful. Beyond just hiding, you could assign sketches/construction geometry to their own layers and if you could easily toggle between the different layers, it would eliminate much of the hunting through sketches and construction geometry to find what I need. 

[cekuhnen]

@carloquinonez Fully agree. In blender I use an open gl view port clipping 

you define a volume from any view and then ervything out that that rectangle (infinite cube) will be invisible allowing you to look into the model.

super fast and easy but also just removing hiding a face is cool

[Beyondforce]

Maybe, that could be an improvement for the Section Analysis!

[carloquinonez]

I wish Section Analysis had more options for sections (2- and 3-cuting planes, arbitrary cutting profiles, etC)  and allowed user-defined cross hatching/color. It would make assembly cutaways a lot easier. Right now, I make a branch of the design (I have a preview of branching/merging) and go to town manually boolean cutting away solid that I want to remove.

[Telliria]

@carloquinonez, These are great ideas, multiple cutting planes as well as curved and partial cutting surfaces would be nice to have. Upvoted.

[susibiker]

I'm new to F360 and couldn't figure out why I couldn't do this. Seems so obvious that this should be part of the F360 toolkit.

Thank you for proposing.

Upvoted.

[haughec]

I can definitely see where this would be valuable, though it likely won't make the top of our priority list for a while.

There are a few workarounds that you may want to consider:

1) Delete the face.  If you invoke the Delete command from the Patch environment, it will allow you to delete a single face (effectively ripping open the solid).  If you're working with a parametric model, you can suppress/delete the Delete feature at any time to restore the face.

2) Change the appearance of the face to a transparent material, like glass.  The face will still be selectable, but you'll be able to see inside the solid.

Hope this helps,

Charles

[carloquinonez]

Thank you Charles -

1. Deleting the faces is currently what I have to do, but only works if I don't need a solid body. If I'm trying to combine a couple of bodies and need to select internal geometry to align them (for example). Removing a face to see the interior changes the body to a surface, which then won't combine with a solid body.

2. Can you post a screen shot of what you mean? I wasn't able to change the appearance of a single face.

[haughec]

Regarding #1 - are you using Parametric modeling, or Direct?  If you're using parametric modeling (the default), the Delete Face operation will be stored as a feature in the timeline, so you can suppress/delete/reorder the feature to manage visibility of the face (and the solid/surface state of the part).  It's not an intuitive workaround, but sometimes it's really valuable because the face is no longer blocks your selection

Regarding #2, please take a look at the attached image.

Are either of these a reasonable solution for your workflow?

Thanks,

Charles

[carloquinonez]

Nice! Transparent faces will be useful. This would be more useful if a single face could be made Unselectable - using the click and hold way to select occluded geometry is clever, but it's really easy to accidentally click on the wrong geometry (and Fusion doesn't make it easy to manage selections, so I end up starting over from scratch and selecting everything again). Regardless, thank you for pointing out I can make faces transparent.

Regarding deleting faces in the timeline... That seems like playing with fire. Sometimes when rebuilding models after I make a change early in the timeline, downstream features break because the visibility of bodies is different than when the feature was created. Besides, it also changes the solid body to a surface body, and most operations act differently with solid vs surface bodies.

Unfortunately, neither of these really solves the challenge of selecting internal geometries when working with solid bodies. Right now, I just end up using the Section Analysis tool and carefully sliding the plane back and forth until I can see the relevant geometry. Two shortcomings with that approach, 1- the section tool has a bug where the cut direction flips 180° after reposition the plane using the handle, and 2- the section also cuts everything else in the scene, including sometimes the other geometry I want to work with.

[keqingsong]

Good discussions here. We're archiving this idea since we're currently focusing on other projects. We've captured this request and we will continue to gather feedback and work on we can improve face selections. 

[zatoo]

For the Fusion 360 programmers, a right click option that states "make face color clear" and "make face color default" would be nice and hopefully an easy shortcut to program in. I could be wrong though 🙂