Rhino 6 Wish for Architecture Students: Section Material on Clipping planes

Serengeti (Rhino WIP)
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Good Morning ( still morning here ).

I was driving home from college right now, had a sort of glimpse based on a house project I am tackling in my end thesis.

The group is divided on a fellow group member who is a Revit devotee… and me, who am a Rhino lover. For me, Rhino gives me ( in the Sennet/Palasmaa way ) the same degree of intimacy of an artisan of a craft. It allows me to create with a deep degree of freedom, but I am still fighting it’s way to document. Revit is all reason and for me feels incredibly cold. It is meant for building, but it has a strong point in documentation. That being, you define sections, and just keep working, and the sheets update on their own.

I would love to in a project, create a layer for section cuts, and create Layouts based on those sections saying “On layout XXX this view is of ortogonal to Clipping PLan YYYY using Pen rendering style”. Or VRay rendering Style. Or define a Parallel view. Or a Perspective. And pre-define cameras and positions and clipping planes, and create print layouts based on those. And as the project progresses, they update themselves, so I could in the end of a week, just open my layouts and press print and go.

I think much of that is already possible, but Rhino still lacks one feature to allow a set layer to have an specific section cut representation when cut, on the clipping plane. Meaning, be able to define, on a Layer, the Hatch and Line properties to display when it is cut. Both line weight for printing and color, as I have for drawing.

If that was possible, even if on the Section Tools, or I would prefer, as part of Rhino 6, Rhino would alone be a complete solution as an architect.

If it already does, and I am lacking in how to find it on tutorials and such online, please, let me know, I have been researching that part for months with no success. I would even settle with some happiness to something similar to SketchUp’s “Layout” tool.

But as good as Rhino is right now on the “design” front, it lacks for me on the documentation front. And I can’t seem to be able to find ways to bridge that gap.

So, here’s a solution for something that if Rhino had right now, my life would be a happy one :wink:

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And I am studying the Section Tool for Section cuts. But for example, I would like the Dirt/Earth to have a section cut representation on the clipping plane. The Concrete another. Glass another. I tend to group my layers by material, so while in render mode, both on VRay or Thea render, I can assign the correct textures and mapping. So wooden beams are all in one layer. They all are represented in sections the same way when I have to turn it into 2D drawing.

So, just being able to say “Objects from this layer, when cut with clipping planes, render as black hatch and the lines when intersected in printing will be 0.9mm black lines”, and be able to associate the normal view of a clipping plane with a layout viewport, for me, would solve the documentation gap in Rhino. For good.

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Check out VisualARQ.

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I am, I own a student license for a while now, but still is a separate product. Just for section cuts and floor plans, it still is something Rhino should solve itself ( instead of buying a separate plugin meant for BIM software just to use the section cut tool… and Visual ARQ is still ages away from a good documentation solution ).

It is Rhino’s deepest aquiles heel for architecture.

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Downloaded and am testing the v2 Beta of Visual Arq, last night I sent a long-ish Email of suggestions for the team. Even Visual Arq won’t allow ( as far as I could find out reading the documentation ) for a set hatch pattern and cut pattern for each layer on the project. It will allow as far as I could test, a single pattern to be used for all materials. But depending on the visualization needed, I do need ( and I believe other architects also do ) more control on the documentation representation.

For example, I would like even on 1:100 that when a wall is cut, it is hatched black solid… when a glass pannel is cut, it is hatched gray, with thin black lines, because it is so thin, upon printing, often depending on the printer, the black lines of the cut will botch and if the middle is also black, it will become such a dense line people may read it as a thin wall pannel instead of a glass pannel, and the diference from a sheet metal curtain wall and glass might be hard to read at first glance. I’d like the floor slab and the actual soil to have diferent hatches when cut. When on 1:20, I’d like wood and metal and concrete to have diferent hatches for detail work.

This is something that works better when rendering a section cut either on Thea Render and VRay ( because I can set a material for each layer ) than for the actual documentation. So, as I do own a copy of Visual Arq, if ASUNI does implement that, I’ll take it gladly. As far as I could find in the documentation, currently it doesn’t ( testing 2.0 now, it has improved a lot,but not on that regard… no matter how much I play with styles setting properties on layers, it still renders the same ). But I deeply honestly think, this is something that should come built into Rhino itself.

Mostly, define the section cuts ( horizontal for floor plans, vertical for sections )… and have them on layout boards, and after the boards are defined, just work the project and they self update.

A wishlist for VisualArq, is to be able to define for each floorplan if I want projections shown ( the above unseen floor, if it doesn’t evenly match the limits as a projection on the cut of the current floor, will be shown in a different defined line style ). But even on Revit this has to be manually re-drawn from what I could understand.

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Thanks for checking it out…

I thought VA did this… @fsalla ??

So wherever the footprint of the slab above the subject level doesn’t match the slab of the subject level you want the deviation in footprint to be automatically drawn?
I can think of several ways to do this efficiently in Revit and have it automatically updating as the model changes, but to actually draw it automatically I’d go straight to Dynamo.
Probably a grasshopper task in Rhino too would be my guess…

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I am looking deeper and deeper into VA… it does actually, I was mistaken. But on an object by object basis. Ideally, it would do in a layer by layer basis. I have been playing with it for two days now, on the 2.0 Beta, and took me a while to find it ( was much easier now that I am much more familar with Rhino than I was months ago when I first tried VA ). But it is still object by object ( as far as I can find in the system ). Please, if there is a layer option, I’d love to find where in the Beta it is.

I could do it programatically in Grasshopper, I really right now would not like to delve into Revit/Dynamo, but the fact in example, you have a half floor over your current floor with a balcony. Or a roof projection. As much as the software is able to take away from me in terms of automating repetitive tasks, the better. But in this case, as this is very architectural based as a need, instead of section cut hatches, which I think Mechanical Engineers would also love to have to diferentiate materials, or designers, I can see it more in terms of a plugin such as VA ( which has the floor levels ) than a core Rhino feature.

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Hi Jessica,

the option to assign section attributes by Layer and show objects located above cut plane in plan views with the 2D attributes control are planned for future versions, but they won’t be available yet in VisualARQ 2.0.[quote=“jessicaluchesi, post:1, topic:45274”]
I would love to in a project, create a layer for section cuts, and create Layouts based on those sections saying “On layout XXX this view is of ortogonal to Clipping PLan YYYY using Pen rendering style”. Or VRay rendering Style. Or define a Parallel view. Or a Perspective. And pre-define cameras and positions and clipping planes, and create print layouts based on those. And as the project progresses, they update themselves, so I could in the end of a week, just open my layouts and press print and go.
[/quote]
Take a look at this VA 2.0 webinar video, minute 12’32’': https://youtu.be/rp6AnuMj3Ro?t=12m33s
Best,

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