Inventor Assembly Visibility When Using the Tube and Pipe Environment

By Shaun Griffiths

When using inventor, you may have spent some time building up your assembly design and are now ready to move onto adding some piping routes. However, when you select the Tube and Pipe environment your assembly dissapears from view, but is still present in the model browser.

I came across this myself a few weeks ago and thought I’d share the resolution.

Basically, in the application options, under display there is an “Inactive Component Appearance” setting for shading (Shaded), in my case this was unselected.

When selected, the assembly reappears with the opacity applied.

However, it is also worth noting you can manipulate this component opacity. Also, on the assembly tab, there is a “Component Opacity” option. Setting this to “All” will remove the opacity and make the assembly appear solid, which may make it easier for selecting routing geometry.