Clipping Plane Effect?

[codycooke01]

Hello,

I have some cad models that I want to animate the outer layers being cut away or disappearing to show the inner workings of the model. Almost like using a masking layer in after effects to reveal or hide a shape. I have been getting the effect I want by using booleans difference. However booleans seem to be quite taxing on the system and are quickly becoming a hinderance as far as maya performance is concerned. I was curious if there is a better / more efficient way of achieving this effect. The models are a little bit dense since they are Cad models, but I don't have the time to retopologize them properly which I am sure would speed this effect up.

Thanks!

[sean.heasley]

Hi @codycooke01

I think I understand what you're going for so I made a quick video showing how you can achieve this effect.

For your cad models, simply select the faces and apply the material like I do in the video as opposed to the whole model.

Please let me know if this helps or if you need any more assistance!

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[Anonymous]

You can use an old command called polyCut for this. I have attached a screen capture of how to use it.

I wonder why so many lovely tools like they are hidden away?

By the way I press T after I select the node to bring up the transform handle

[codycooke01]

Hello Sean,

The effect I am going for is more along the lines of this.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oioIIwu0dgE&feature=youtu.be

As you can see when I grab the outer control group, which is just a box using the boolean difference mode, I can then drag the group to cut away the outer layer of geometry. However when I grab the inner control it is very slow. I have also had issues when sending operations like this one to render farms. Do you know of a better way to get the same effect?

Thanks!

[mspeer]

Hi!

Sure, Booleans are slow (based on vertex/face count, it's a complex calculation). Does this matter?

"I have also had issues when sending operations like this one to render farms"

What issues?

[damaggio]

As an alternative, you could download a trial version of VRAY and use the vray clipper feature for rendering.

[codycooke01]

Hello Mspeer,

I get that its complex I just assumed that it would be more optimized. Right now I have a high probability of maya crashing, hence why the slow response time is turning into a detriment. Which is why I was hoping there was a more optimized way to get this same effect.

Some of the issues I have seen is the model disappearing from frames, being corrupted in the render, and also coming back with shading errors.

Thanks!

[mspeer]

Hi!

If you don't want to correct your geometry, you could use polyCut as @Anonymous suggested, which is faster and more stable, or try Bool from mainframe:

https://www.mainframe.co.uk/products/bool

For this price i would give it a try.

[Anonymous]

Hi Mspeer,

The BOOL tool from Mainframe uses the same boolean tech as Maya under the hood, it's just a prettier interface for dealing with it (and I love it). So it may not help here.

I'm fairly confident that polyCut is the tool for this job.

Cheers,

Darrell