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3D Clip Cube


Jim Smith

Question

I would like to have a Clip Cube that allows one to cut into a building or an object. Think of it this way: One would establish a Viewport then one would have a tool that would act like Subtract Solid Command; but this would only effect the View within the Viewport, & not the object. Here's the kind of thing I mean:

Cutaway_steam_locomotive.jpg

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You kind of can now.  Create a Viewport showing the building/model as you wish.  Go to the layer with the viewport and use the Clip Cube to set the view as you want. Now the trick is to Save View and make sure that Save View Orientation is turned on. This will save the Clip Cube setting. When you use the Saved View to go back to the model, it will automatically turn the clip cube on and with the settings you had when you saved the view.

 

It is one extra step, but not too bad. Especially if you already use Saved Views for other drawing setting.

 

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Thanks Pat, I get that. (Not that I use Saved Views very much, 98%  just Viewports.) Perhaps I wasn't quite clear in my suggestion. The Clip Cube is, well, a cube. What you see in the cut-a-way of the steam locomotive is this isn't a neat and tidy clip but it jigs & jogs not following a particular plane but many planes. The idea would be to have a more robust 3D shape more like the Subtract Solid command rather than a cube. The other drawback of the Clip Cube is items in the foreground that one would like to keep have to be illustrated in another Viewport; or not at all. Since I'm dreaming in colour here, having the ability to control the opacity of what has been CLIPPED would also be handy.

Edited by Jim Smith
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Sorta yeah.

I would like to have my Viewport; Hidden Line, Wireframe or Final Quality Render. Then I would like to be able to monkey around with the object with a tool similar to Subtract Solid to show the bees in the hive but not touch the honey. This "Subtract Solid" would not effect anything else. Look at the Locomotive in my illustration as I think this gives the best example of how I would like to be able to illustrate stuff. 

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Personally I want to be able to do this type of thing -

 

Screen Shot 2017-01-18 at 9.33.54 AM.png

 

so I would be more interested in a way to do a 3d crop. I've shown the cylinder I cropped out as an example of a crop. You would need to be able to select whether you want to see what's inside or outside of the crop object. As someone said above, the clip cube is still always a cube.....

 

I do like Jim's idea of being able to control which classes are clipped. It would allow the inner fins in my example above to not get clipped.

 

I'm pretty sure I've wished for a 3d crop before.

 

Kevin

Edited by Kevin McAllister
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  • Vectorworks, Inc Employee

Yep Custom 3D crop is in the list a few times. I have it in as letting the user custom model a solid and then using that as the boundary for the cube.

 

Separately, I have a wish in allowing the clip cube to work as you describe above, designating an area of negative space (I am probably not using that term properly) rather than JUST being able to designate the exterior boundary of the clipping area as we can now, limited to a rectangular prism shape.

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A 3D crop would be useful for working with architects who insist all sections should run through the ridge. Then disparage the software when the selected section doesn't run through the right features of the building.

 

We could tweak a section without changing the section line and avoid going through in plane walls, or make sure it goes through the most useful part of a minor detail like a floor hatch.

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To all,  you are never going to get a tool that cuts the model exactly the way you want it, when you get into advanced stuff.  the model below, i had to choose what items were to be cut one way and then other items were cut another way.  this was ok & work fine, but the problem was that when i wanted to show the model uncut i had no way to turn off the 3d objects that were used to cut it. so i had to also have an uncut model (this meant duplicating my model)  IF a simple way to turn off custom 3d cut objects was available then we could cut anything the way we wanted & then just turn off those cut objects when we want a whole model again vs having a special 3d cut tool that tries to produce our vision.

 

PHX.png

Edited by digitalmechanics
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1 hour ago, martinfdc said:

Would be nice to have a clip cube that could do stuff like this... Or is this already possible? How could one do this in a viewport or in a design layer?

 

 

stadium image.jpg

To best of my knowledge, it's just not possible to do this in VW at the moment, unfortunately, unless you want to actually cut the geometry permanently.

 

(even though some VW2017 promo material shows an image with this kind of section cut faked up)

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On 10/02/2017 at 3:24 PM, Resuelvectorworks said:

I really would like to create a perspective 3D viewport of the clip cube to insert in the sheets, now you have to "cheat" , you export the clip cube as an image and imported back into the sheet layer, but if there are changes in the model you have do it all over again
 

05-24052016-DP-02-Magallanes.jpg

You can do this without "cheating" - get your clip cube set up, highlight the relevant face and do a "create section viewport" but make this a *design layer* viewport, then go to that design layer, choose your perspective view of that design layer "viewport" (which is actually more like a sliced 3d model) and then save this view as your sheet layer viewport and you get something like what you've shown. You can only do a single-plane slice like this though.

 

This is about the most confusing procedure possible but it does work. Well, at least sometimes - I have a feeling there's a bug in VW2017 but maybe it's been resolved in SP2, I haven't actually tried doing this recently.

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