From the course: Architectural Documentation in Rhino

The amazing clipping plane - Rhino Tutorial

From the course: Architectural Documentation in Rhino

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The amazing clipping plane

- [Lecturer] In this video, we check out the Rhino Clipping Plane, a very powerful and a pretty cool tool for making cross sections. These cross sections will go through all geometry, including your entire scene. Right now in the perspective view, we've got a couple of Clipping Planes here, already positioned. Also note, they are on their own layer so I can turn them off if I don't need to see them but they always will work whether that layer is on or off. Also note that they're pretty simple flat icons and they do have a directional arrow, so that's the direction they'll be looking everything above it or to the other side, I should say, will be clipped off. Now once you select it, the Properties to a bar if it's open will go straight to the Clipping Plane option, if not, you can do that now. And you can flip the direction, so that arrow can go up or down very easily without having to rotate it. And then we could activate it, right now, it is not clipping anything, you might have noticed. So let's click on Perspective and now we get the cross section right through everything in the scene. So you can kind of understand now that this Clipping Plane doesn't really matter where it is and therefore, I typically have it off to the side. All right, we can also have two at once. Let's select this Clipping Plane here which is arranged vertically and looking towards the back end or the North of the file, we can activate the Perspective Viewports and we got two Clipping Planes all the same time. Another cool thing you can do with these guys is you can select one of 'em and move them around. I'm just going to use my Nudge keys and hit the Page Down and move through the file or you could do smaller steps and it works pretty quick and easily, very nice. So I just pointed out that in case you don't get the Clipping Plane in the exact right spot, you could just move it around through Nudge or any other normal drag methods, okay that's how you activate them and some of their settings. Let's go ahead and turn these two off and we're going to make our own new one in one of the other viewports. So we'll double click on Perspective and go over here to the front view, the place to create one is under Display and right here is the icon for Add a Clipping Plane. Now we're going to make a simple icon rectangle, doesn't matter exactly where it is, it'll keep shooting out in all directions but by picking this front viewport, it's going to look in the same general direction so it's an orthogonal view and it's looking from the South to the North so I could just draw a simple little box or square and it goes right through the scene. Notice it's not occurring in any other of the viewports especially the perspective here and that's because it's activated by the only viewport that you've created in but it's pretty easy just to go over to the Properties one more time, hit Perspective and it will cut any other viewports as well. You might have noticed this last one looks a little bit different and that's because it's color is black and the other guys were red. So the color of the layer is what gives the Clipping Plane its color and also the section cuts. So we can have this one match, we just select it, I'm going to go to Clipping Plane, layer, right click and then Change Object Layer, so that'll kind of match the other two we already created. Another thing to note when the Clipping Plane is going through objects that are solid, you get a nice, clean fill like we see here at the site. There's some walls here and some floors, however, areas that are open, we only get the effect along those edges so that's important, you might want to close things off or just save some time for some Photoshop tweaking. Okay, let's zoom out, I'm going to go ahead and delete this guy, just Select, hit Delete, he'll disappear. When I use one of the earlier ones, turn it back on at perspective and talk about some other cool effects we can get. So right now we're in shaded view, let's switch over to that Pen Plus version we created not too long ago. So I'm going to go to Pen Plus, this is a very stylized, precision looking illustration or viewport mode and we can see, we can have some really amazing drawings with very little work. Of course, you'd want to do a screen capture like we discussed earlier but we can also turn on shadows which the coolest part of all. So I'm going to flip over to Display, here's the Shadows options. The cool thing about the shadows is, they only are cast from the parts that are in the scene, so the areas like, of up at the roof level that were, are now out of view do not cast shadows so it's pretty accurate. Let's take a look around here, I'm going to switch back to the shaded mode just to wrap this up and also activate the, both of these Clipping Planes here. And let's talk about modifying some of these attributes of the colors and section lines and the fill materials. So up until now, they've all been the same colors, Clipping Plane layer, however, we can override that pretty easily. I'm going to go over to the current Display which is shaded, click on the Edit Shaded Settings and, this is a little bit headers, we're going to go all the way down to the bottom. So right now it's the Clipping Plane section we're looking at, we have Fills, it's typically defaulting to Viewport, we can switch it the Planes Material. Of course there's nothing on the plane right now but solid colors probably your best bet, so I'm going to click on that and there's a color I picked earlier so there's a punchy green. You can match any other color. The edges were seen, can be shown or not shown, typically you want to leave those on and they're going to assume the plane's color. Our default edges are three, let's crank that up just to take a look at what it might result in. I'm going to make it six and you could see it gets a little bit muddy. Actually, keep that around two or three pixels which is the default and if you don't like that red section because of the layer it's on, you can pick another solid color for this section and the filler. And they can be completely separate so you can see right now, we've got a Fill color of green and a Line of black. Let's just hit Cancel to not have any of those settings be activated. Let's now talk about the last element of using Clipping Planes, I'm going to go back to Properties. You might have noticed this View here is called Model View so coming up soon, we're going to talk about layout views and Clipping Planes can do a lot of work on those entities, just want to point out where that would be accessed so it's on the same area here, Clipping Plane On Properties. So the Clipping plane is both cool and easy to use so feel free to have fun and experiment. And it's not just for presentation, you can use during the design phase to hide specific parts of your model while you continue to work on other areas that might otherwise have been covered up.

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