How to Select Only Visible Faces

[cbillipsTNXY2]

I am working on a costume for Halloween, and part of that costume requires a cowl. I have decided to modify an available Batman cowl from Thingiverse since I can't find anything to match what I'd like. The only modification I'd like to make to the model is removing the ears from the cowl. It appears that all the cowls are exported STLs of in-game assets, which means they are very high-poly. The only way I can think of removing the ears is to delete the faces that make the ears and close the open face that is left over. The problem is that using the drag-select feature selects both visible and hidden faces. Is there a way for me to change this? If not, is there a way for me to select a large region of faces without selecting thousands of faces individually? Alternatively, is there an easier way to remove the ears like splitting them from the rest of the part? Any help would be greatly appreciated.

[swalton]

Inventor does not have good tools for working with STL files.  Normally, I use the .stl as a guide so I can re-model the shape using the normal Inventor workflows.

You may want to use Fusion 360 from Autodesk, or other 3rd party tools. 

See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tVGtG-UjlYg&t=0s

or 

https://help.autodesk.com/view/fusion360/ENU/?guid=GUID-C4CF950C-B7E9-40D7-AB0F-5D47463131C1

[pcrawley]

Looking at your Inventor model, the problem objects (the ears) look as though they might be separate meshes in the original Bat_helm_4.0_Back.stl file.  (See how they poke through into the cavity for your head?)

If they are separate objects, you can probably just delete them in either Fusion or 3ds max.  If you want to post the original file, someone here may have a minute to do it for you.