Manifold Internal Passages Appearance

[bganshornCAMBV]

I design hydraulic manifolds and am new to using Inventor.  In the software I used to use I was able to set the manifold itself to transparent but my internal cuttings in the manifold would display as solid so it was very easy to see what was going on inside the manifold.  With Inventor I have not been able to figure out how to change my settings to make this possible.  I am quite confident it can be done as I have seen and used a program called MDTools which is made for hydraulic manifold design that works inside Inventor and it displays exactly how I would like, see the attached MDTools Screen Shot picture.  All I can do is make the entire manifold including all the internals transparent which isn't the best for seeing inside the block as can be seen the second attachment.  The more internal drillings the manifold has, the harder it is to see what is going on inside.  The best option I was given was to turn the block to a glass appearance, use a 3D sketch to sketch all the cube lines of the manifold so you can still see the manifold envelope then delete all the manifold faces so you can see inside.  This is not practical as all the cavities I put in the manifold are ifeatures I have made and they need a face to be inserted on so I have to constantly suppress and unsuppress the deleted faces and it still doesn't show the internal faces without transparency although it is better than just changing the appearance to transparent.  Buying MDTools is not an option at this time as it is an expensive program and I don't do enough manifold design to justify the cost.  Any suggestions on how to get this appearance in Inventor?

[SBix26]

Please attach a sample part, and (always in the first post!) let us know what version of Inventor you're using.

Update: if you choose a transparent appearance for the part (glass, for instance), you can then select individual features and change their appearance to something else.  Unfortunately, even if the chosen appearance for the internal feature is a solid color, it will still be transparent because the overall solid body is.  But it's still better than nothing.

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Sam B
Inventor Pro 2019.2 | Windows 7 SP1
LinkedIn

[bganshornCAMBV]

Thanks Sam, I am running Inventor Professional 2018.  Sample part with simple cavities is attached.

[SBix26]

As I added to my previous message, you can change the appearance of individual features, as shown below.  The appearances are still transparent, but at least you can distinguish them.  The most intense and brightest colors appear to give the best contrast.

Hope this is useful,

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Sam B
Inventor Pro 2019.2 | Windows 7 SP1
LinkedIn

[johnsonshiue]

Hi Guys,

I think I have seen this exact same part and the exact same discussion before. The solution I offered was to use Delete Face to remove the planar faces. But, the part will be turned into a surface.

Many thanks!

[bganshornCAMBV]

Yes, I put in a request to Autodesk for support with this issue and your response is was what I referenced in my original post.  Using delete faces is not a good solution for me, especially on larger more complex manifolds.  What I keep going back to is the fact that there is software out there that runs within Inventor and they can make Inventor give the exact appearance I am looking for without deleting faces.  This tells me there has to be a way of doing it.  This isn't standalone software, it only works within Inventor. 

[johnsonshiue]

Hi! From Inventor's perspective, what I mentioned before still holds true. I am not aware of any other out-of-box solutions. If you are aware of an add-in, could you share it here?

Many thanks.