Camera Clipping Question

Maybe this is more of a max question, but if use camera clipping to slice a building in half, then I’ll render half of the building, correct?

But what if I want to turn the camera angle but keep the building in half? The camera clipping no longer cuts the building in half but at an angle.

Is there a way to keep the clipping of the first angle so that way I don’t have to cut ALL of the geometry in half manually?

Could you duplicate the building, use a slice plane, and make one half invisible to camera ?
Its a stretch, I know.:slight_smile:

Regards,
Mike

A slice plane? Well, the building is also full of furniture and people as well…

It might crash your scene but if you group everything together you can apply a slice modifier to everything at once.

“Might” or “Probably”? LOL.

Thanks for the tip. I’ll try that out in a few days when I’m done with some other parts. I’m kinda scared to be honest.

Too bad Vray couldn’t simply “read” another camera’s clipping and know to divide a scene based upon that. Would be a nice feature.

This thread on cgarchitect has some other ideas you could try if the slice modifer is crashing max

http://www.cgarchitect.com/vb/34377-how-achieve-oblique-sectional-view.html

Thanks guys. I wish I could have moved this to the off-topic section. At first, I didn’t know if it was related to Vray Camera Clipping.

what about cebas scalpelmax or whatever its called?

Wow. Spending so much money recently. Thanks for pointing that out too. I might check into it if Max Slice doesn’t work right.

collapse to editable mesh

I would make a duplicate of your group and attach all to one editable mesh with blur’s attachselection script. then apply the slice to that…nice and clean (slicing a group probably no fun)

Usually the blur script works really nice - in fact I use it ALL the time. But on really complex scenes with a lot of textures and geometry it tends to get the groups mixed up.

I tried several different methods without buying additional software but ended up just throwing in a plane and cutting/shifting everything manually.

Put as many objects as you can on a layer that you can simply hide. Then you can actually apply a slice modifier to several objects at once. It will be instanced between all the objects selected and will have the same transforms. Set it to Remove Top and rotate it into place.

Tip: Turn off the modifier before moving the slice gizmo so that you don’t have wait while all the objects update in the viewport.

You can also use the Align tool to position the Gizmo. so create a Point helper where you want the slice to occur. Rotate it so the XY plane is parallel to your section direction. This way if you have to add new slice mods, you can alighn their gizmo to the point object.

The functionality may be a little overkill for just clipping, but I recently got great results from the now native max tool “ProCutter.”

Here is a tutorial video showing a basic concept of how it works: