Clipping objects?

[Chris_Molland]

Hello

I'm developing some scenes to create engineering cutaway illustrations, just like those from the Eagle Annual for those who remember that! I'm using Maya 2013 and Mental Ray.

I want to create the effect of looking through some outer surfaces to see the geometry within. I don't want to render this directly but create sufficient rendered 'layers' so that I can perform the cutting away in After effects affording me greater flexibility to adjust my cutaway masks.

Where this becomes difficult is when you have a surface which wraps around items within, imagine a car body which you want to look within. To allow me to mask the front, outer surface of the car, so that I can see through into the car and see the seats in front of the body at the other side I need to create an image depicting the seats in front of the back half of the car body and then place a second image of the complete outside of the car over the top. Now I can create a mask to see through the outer body into the car.

I could split the car body surface in two but for the scenes I am about to create, with multiple camera views, this would be very difficult.

What I want is a 'super clipping plane'. A camera clipping plane is great if I want to hide surfaces directly in front of the camera but this isn't flexible enough for me. So to my question, eventually - Is it possible to create an object or volume and get a camera to only render surfaces within the object (or outside of it)?

I want to create either a plane or an object which tells the camera whether to render points or not depending on where each point is relative to my 'clipping object'.

Any suggestions would be very welcome.

Thanks