Rhino still needs better Section Tools

Rhino
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To start - I’d just want to say I’ve recently updated and I love Rhino 8. Cheers to the team on a job well done.

The integration with Section Tools and the improved “Object’s section properties” is a good start but I still have my remarks.

Rhino needs a Section Management Panel. Section Tools do it all, but it’s so painful to manage sections.

If it’s a global state - why do I need to go into the viewport to manage each section?!

The same thing goes for the clipping plane as well. There is some sort of managing the clipping planes, but I still must turn them on-off, and the section is not even contained as a boxed section.

Just throw away the clipping planes and make it all under the Section Tools umbrella.
I would rename it Clipping Tools, but given the audience Rhino has - Section tools would be more universally understood.

There are so many panels that I feel are pointless and very niche [I’m sure someone else might not], that I don’t understand how this was overlooked for so long.

VisualARQ panels for managing levels and sections are a good start.

The idea would be to re-name them and be able to toggle on/off, isolate and group sections [for example - containing a group of sections for one building on a lot].

Also, the performance of Rhino when Sections/Clipping planes are involved is a bit wonky.
I understand it will always depend on the scene, and the types of elements involved, but sometimes it just lags on simple, concept-starting scenes.
GPU tessellation also doesn’t like clipping stuff, so… It needs to get better.

The ability to manage sections would better the workflow for engineers in general, and it would be such a nice “quality of life” feature.

I really hope this gets attention.

Cheers.

PS. How cool would it be if we could set different display modes based on outside and inside of a Section Box???

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Agree. Here is a YT item to compile feedback. Thanks for adding your thoughts.

I agree that speed improvements is needed. Most of the lag comes from generating the background (currently using same base as that of Make2D), so one thing you may consider is to turn off the generation of the “Background” for a section, and only add it when the concept is more complete and ready to document or export.

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This is so nice to hear.
I have so many ideas… I will defiantly give feedback!

When we are talking about “Background”>

  • is it the Viewport background, as - Make it transparent?;
  • or is it the “Background” for the item in its Section Properties?

I find that the biggest impact is seen when preparing Layouts.
I use Rhino on a few PCs from different eras [Rhino 8 still not tested on the older machines], so performance, naturally, depends a lot on your machine.
But still, when I see a lag on a very capable machine is a bit of a downer.

Thank you again!
I will contribute my thoughts on YT.

I can’t seem to get in YT, not even as a guest.
I also saw that there was an extensive thread for this over the years, from the initial post.
I will go throguh it and note down my thoghts in a post.

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Yes, when you extract the drawing using ClippingDrawings command, there is an option to add the background. This will take long time to extract depending on the scene.

Please add your comments in Discourse, and I will point to them from the YT