Rhino 8 introduces two new clipping features to help view and communicate complex models. Those are selective clipping and clipping depth.
Selective Clipping:
You can select a subset of objects and layers to be clipped by any given clipping plane.
There are two ways to set what to be clipped:
Use the ClippingPlane command to create a clipping plane. In the property panel of the clipping plane, set the Clip Participation to Include Selected or Exclude Selected. Click the Objects or the Layers buttons to set what objects or layers to clip (or exclude from clipping).
Use the new ClippingSection command to select the objects to be clipped. The command is found under Drafting/Sections menu and in the drafting toolbar.
You can view a slice of the model using the clipping plane custom depth property.
The viewing depth is added as an option to ClippingPlane and ClippingSections commands. You can also update the depth from the clipping plane property panel.
This is an excellent new feature! I’ve always wanted this and had to do with time consuming boolean operations just for the sake of presentations!
I cannot wait to upgrade to v8!
Thank you Rajaa!
thank you very much for this, the new command for ClippingSection is a lot more help than just clipping plane now that it generates a named view with the same name also. We can now put these named views on layouts.
Now the only thing we´re really missing is plotting these beautiful sections with all the shading and hidden lines in vector format PDF, so that we can create magnificient drawings which do not take up 100s of MB each.
And maybe a possibility to automatically generate these sections one next to each other along a path with some tolerance setting (maximum deviation from base curve, maximum section length, divide by amount … ??) and possibly based on properties of specified, previously selected section.
Nevertheless - thank you very much for your work!!
1. Both include and exclude should be available at the same time in given Clipping Plane
In the example below I quickly included the Wall layer to Be clipped, but I want certain Walls (objects) to be excluded from that.
Right now I can overcome this by switching from Layer Clipping to Object Clipping and manually selecting all Walls with the exception of ones that I don’t want to clip.
The problem with this workaround is that it quickly becomes outdated as soon as I add new Walls. - I must correct Object selection.
So the hierarchy of settings should be like that:
Include: layer Walls
Exclude: selected objects from Layer Walls.
2. Object selection must be also possible based on other than Layer or Object - preferably Object Attribute Text
I bake geometry from Revit into Rhino and replace/refresh it all the time. Because after rebaking new geometries are not the same GUIDs as previously, every object selection is lost…
I would solve it by attaching User Attribute Text to given Revit geometries, so the connection between Revit and Rhino objects is stable.
Then I would include/exclude clipping of some objects based on their Key/Value.
BTW Object User Text should be also used in other Rhino functions like e.g. Named Selections
Many thanks for this!
Some display related things:
First, when objects are moved ‘through’ a clipping plane interactively, a confusing mix of the yellow selection wireframe, the object and the section surface is shown. It just doesn’t look right.
We should expect the object to look correctly clipped all the time when moving, not just after mouse up, right?
Second, something regarding clipping plane’s arrows and text: when changing the length of the clipping plane, their size should remain the same, not scale up or down!
And why are the ends of the clipping line suddenly… clipped when moving a control point?
I believe the curves / outlines extracted with _ExtractClippingSections used to be linked to the section plane. They’re not linked currently.
For this section I chose the fills option and the fills by default are meshes for a mesh and the texture is applied. The surface normals seem to be inconsistent.
I’m not sure if applying the texture from the original object makes sense and I think I’d prefer to have the fill extracted as a hatch instead of a mesh for a mesh and surface for a polysurface. Is there a setting where this could be customized?
_UpdateClippingSection and _ExportClippingSection commands are dead.
We used to have a _ToolbarReset command. I tried Reset and reset just toolbar customizations. What is the recommended process to get rid of dead commands / icons?
Hi @martinsiegrist I found this workflow that may help for that. Set the object’s section style to by clipping plane and then edit the clipping plane style to use a solid fill with a custom color. You can then use the eyedropper to sample.
