I work with point clouds and models of large architectural projects. When selecting points or objects there’s almost always something BEHIND what I’m trying to select that’s tedious to work around. Is there some method of having a dynamic control (scroll wheel?) that would clip anything beyond a distance while I’m working and rotating? I’m imagining a clipping “bubble” that follows your view direction and can be depth controlled in real time. Is there such a thing? Would be grateful for any suggestions. Thank you kindly.
Hi Pascal. Thanks for the reply. I use clipping planes constantly. Just wondering how to set a temporary one relative to view direction that could be depth adjusted on the fly, kinda like how the Nudge command works with the arrow keys or some other means (mouse wheel?). It’s often difficult to select or edit large models in perspective view without selecting things way in the background. Would be great to control the depth of view without having to stop, create, then move a clipping plane first. Then as soon as I rotate the view the clipping plane I just created is useless. You can imagine this gets tedious after a while.
Hoping there might be a way to accomplish this with a script, Grasshopper, or some other method. Sadly I’m not a skilled programmer. Thank you.
Hi Brian - I thought so, just making sure. There is no tool like this but I can imagine it might be something that could be bludgeoned into a reasonably useful state in a script.
Hi Brian - @Brian_Jackson1 just a quick first cut at this but see how this works - you get to snap a point in 3d and everything behind/farther away from the viewpoint is clipped.
WOW! See, this is why you rock and others… well, don’t. A sincere debt of gratitude for this, Pascal. Will make wonderful use of this script. Thank you kind sir.
Have been using your script for the past few hours and really liking it. Thank you again, Pascal. It’s assigned to an alias and I love how repeating the command restores the view. I’d consider adding this to upcoming versions of Rhino. It reduces a tedious manual routine to a single click, and useful ‘in the moment’ to preserve your train of thought. Much obliged.
Hi Brian - I tuned this up a little after using it a bit - see if this works better for you or not
you explicitly set the viewport to clip before you start. This allows setting the depth point in any view, which may be much more convenient than in the view that is being clipped.
added an Object command line option - this lets you select an object at the depth you want - the clipping starts on the far side of that object.
I suppose the next rhing would be to, for now, put the added plane on its own, off, layer so you never need to deal with it. I don’t know if I can make a cp that does not ever show up in the document at all.
Thank you, Pascal. This is SO nice! Already using it quite a bit, and I sure do appreciate it. Not sure it needs anything else. Seems to delete the clipping plane automatically when the command is entered again, which is very handy for this temporary view depth control. Definitely one of my go-to scrips now.