Today I tried to use SectionTools in Rhino 8 and found that the previous options “NumOfSections”, “Spacing” and “BothSides” are missing in the V8 version (command “_ClippingSections” under Drafting/Sections/Create). I then checked in the Rhino8 online docs, but I could not find anything about setting equally spaced sections automatically.
Then I installed SectionTools from the PackageManager with no error., It shows up in the installed packages with version 2021.4.30.511 - so it should be “somewhere”. But the previous command “stCreate” is not showing up in the command line after installation.
Do I need to go back to Rhino 7 to use those options (NumOfSections, Spacing, BothSides)? Seems strange to me that a new version has fewer functionality than the previous one. But maybe I am just missing something. Can please someone help?
Hi @ore
SectionTools in Rhino 8 is more tightly integrated and hence all regular Rhino commands work.
So, you can create one section with ClippingSection Command, then use Rhino Array/Copy commands to generate all other clipping sections. When you set the initial clipping section to be A_00 for example, the copies created with Array or Copy command will increment the names to A_01, A02, etc.
You don’t have to install the Old SectionTools through the PackageManager anymore.
thanks for the hint - yes, that helps. The more tight integration into Rhino surely makes sense. And I found the way you suggested works very well.
However, I personally think additionally getting the “NumOfSections”, “Spacing” and “BothSides” back would be appreciated by many.
And I think it would be great to have a little hint on how to do it in V8 (just as you described for me), available to all users who will not see this conversation. Maybe here:
I recently upgraded to V8 was also wondering where to find the options for auto generating multiple clipping curves with a given spacing. Copying the sections by hand seems to be useful but I would appreciate an automatic function to do this.
But now I am missing an option to automatically distribute the created clipping curves across multiple layers as I need this for a specific workflow. Is this possible? Currently, when I create a Clipping section on a particular layer, the extracted clipping curve is created on the currently selected layer and not the one to which the clipping section is assigned to.
I exporting this to Adobe Illustrator for further editing an the Layers for the corresponding clipping heights should remain as Layers in Illustrator. I cannot sort this by hand, because the number of objects is sometimes several thousand objects or more.
Please see the attached screenshot (with only a few objects).
This works almost perfectly! Thank you very much!
The only thing I’m missing is that the color of the source objects is not automatically assigned to the section curves. Perhaps you can give me a hint on how to implement this?
