Visibility arising from computer vision, geometrical design and complexity analysis is widely used in manufacturing processes. According to the definition of the visibility cone of a point, two kinds of visibility of a feature, namely a complete visibility cone and a partial visibility cone, are defined, and the relation between visibility map and complete visibility cone is also discussed. To solve a kind of accessibility and setup problem in mold parting, NC-machining and CMMs inspection path planning, a procedure is proposed to perform visibility analysis with respect to the geometry of the part, the shape of the effector, and degrees of freedom between part/effector. A new method for computing visibility cones is formulated by identifying C-obstacles in Configuration Space (C-Space), in which a general and efficient algorithm is presented and implemented using visibility culling. Compared with previous methods, the proposed algorithm is efficient even in very complex scenes. Finally, the contributions and limits of our work are discussed.