Wish: Clipping Box

Instead of just having the possibility to use clipping planes, very useful in numerous cases would be to have a clipping box (instead of the need to create 6 planes)

With the possibility to move each face of this box using the gumball or dragging, respectively each vase should be constrained to move only along its normal.

Another possibility for the box to be able to be rotated.

4 Likes

I have here locally for Raytraced clipping volumes working. Any geometry that gets a render mesh can be tagged to function as a clipping volume. You could do a clipping sphere, or clipping box (typoed clipping ox there, but if you had one, it could be one). You could do any edit to the object you can think of. It is quite fun.

That’s great but if it is only for Raytraced, it is not useful at all.

Oh, just saying, since I think it is probably not too hard to get it to work in other display modes as well (but what do I know).

:+1:

1 Like

hi @nathanletwory what is the news regarding this feature does it work already could it be implemented for renderview? i would really need to define a volume which acts as a clipper. right now i have a structure which has to have a negative volume in such clipping box so that only chosen parts get clipped.

No news.

was it some sort of test project, which got abandoned?

Test project. There is no good way to integrate this properly yet.

ic… well it would be a real gorgeous tool. it basically works like a boolean function? right now i have to rebuild entire set ups. for instance a building structure in a plan. to have certain structures seem like they would avoid clipping plane i have to extrude them beyond the plane and switch off edges that it looks like it. pretty sure that would make many happy, here a similar request with quite some attention.

No, my implementation marks objects that are used as clipping object. When rays hit in the front face they skip that and any other geometry along its path until it hits a clipping object in the back face. So it is no boolean stuff, rather ray manipulation.

Are people interested in this aware of the plugin ClippingBox | Food4Rhino?

I ended up creating my own python script a while ago when I was looking for this functionality.
However, Rhino needs a bit of improvement (even R7) in order to make this done properly and fast enough. For this also McNeel need to realize the need and purpose on their own (like every other case) which I think they are currently missing.

well in your case you probably have to look in from the sides so a box which clips the outer stuff is ok but what if you have to clip something only outside horizontally, i guess your script simply produces a box made from a few clipping planes which would not work in this crude example below.

i can move the objects further down, IF they are separate objects and not part of a structure

but the problem is that only works in plan but not in a perspective, so there is no solution other than to composite images together…

This is what my script does:

after unhiding all objects you will see the ugly looking clipping planes with no easy way of manipulation.
What McNeel need to understand is that a new object type is necessary for proper implementation of this, arguably, highly demanded functionatlity. A clipping box on its own whereas you can select and move faces of that box that each face is a clipping plane that is trimmed so the view doesn’t look like this:

FWIW the clipping volumes I talk about are inverted from what you are talking about. They are not the same.

I know, that’s why I said they are of no use (to shipbuilding at least)