Perspectival section rendering

I was experimenting here with the possibility of using an image editor to combine views of an architectural model that were clipped (most of the parts of the model representing the building, sectioned using the Clipping Plane tool) with views from the same model that were not clipped (the central wind vane sculpture and the platform below). There are Mannerist historic examples of this sort of “perspectival section.”

It’s become my rendering “style” to collage and pixel-scrub all output from digital models (in this case, image files originally extracted from the Rhino model using the Capture Viewport to File with various custom Viewport Display Modes), so I decided to take the whole technique a little farther from digital collage to outright digital painting over the Rhino output. I’m not entirely happy with the result, even though it took me three days in front of Rhino and Photoshop to get to this point. For instance, there’s a mysterious issue with images extracted from the clipped and the non-clipped version of the same model not quite lining up, although I have the Viewport locked and the output resolution consistent between the two. You probably won’t notice these issues unless you zoom way past normal magnification, but I still feel the need to fix misalignments if possible with tedious masking in PS. I also added in Photoshop selective blurring and various fake scratches/stains to obscure the problems that I couldn’t easily rectify.

This clipped/not-clipped combined image would be trivial to create in–ahem–certain other 3D modelers, where the clipping can be applied or not applied to different objects in the same model depending on whether or not the clipping plane object is embedded in a block or outside of it. I wish Rhino permitted that.

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V8 has object based clipping - if you have v7, grab the WIP and give it a try!

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Maybe you already know it but the Showzbuffer tool can help a lot with fading images.

Another trick I use time by time is a specific viewport style for making object mask. Everything black but the white object.

Hope I’m helping you.

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Excellent, thanks, I’ve been holding off with version 8 WIP while in the middle of a project, but I will definitely check that out now that I am at the rendering and illustration stage.

Thanks! I’m already on top of that sort of masking (I have specific customized Viewport Display modes for isolating and masking layer colors, clippling masks, silhouettes/edges, and render materials), and I have used the Showzbuffer tool as well.

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