Wishes
Post your wishes about Graphisoft products: Archicad, BIMx, BIMcloud, and DDScad.

3D Cutting planes - zooming & snapping

Paul King
Advisor
I would like to see the archaic cutting planes interface brought up to speed, so that user can zoom in part way through placement to ensure that cut plane will include & exclude desired elements

On anything larger than a house, scale of model in interface window is currently a significant problem, and requires many time consuming trial & error attempts to get right.

Ability to snap to elements & define offset for cutting plane would also be useful

Ability to save cutting plane with saved view is also of critical importance on large projects, especially when defining cut planes is so arduous & time consuming due to trial & error involved, as noted above. Often the same cutaway view is required at dfferent times in project's development, and reproducing exact same view is currently impossible

Finally, I would much rather define cutting planes in the 3D window & in plan. In 3D OpenGL window they could appear as translucent planes, with everything forward of cut being ghosted. Such functionality would be very useful as a live visualisation & model geometry trouble shooting tool as well,

Use of current Special Menu "use section lines in 3D " is not an adequate substitute - because cut elements cannot be assigned a single colour, and because non vertical sections are not supported.
PAUL KING | https://www.prime.net.nz
ArchiCAD 8-27 | Twinmotion 2023
Windoze 11 PC | Intel Core i9 10900K | Nvidia Gforce RTX 3080 | 32 Gb DDR3 | 2x4K monitor extended desktop
21 REPLIES 21
James B
Graphisoft
Graphisoft
I think the last time I used Cutting Planes was in University about 6 years ago.

Not to say others don't use em. I've actually also wanted this feature upgraded. Though in my mind, I would prefer to get rid of the existing feature, and instead include a 3D Marquee tool, where you can drag any edge in 3D, in XY, YZ, XZ range and utilising the existing "inside/outside" marquee feature. I think it should be integrated.

That's just my dream
James Badcock
Graphisoft Senior Product Manager
Paul King
Advisor
To some extent I agree - a more user friendly 3D marquee would be more consistent with the existing interface

However marquee has unfortunate side effect of corrupting some library parts, doors/ windows - even commercial ones. (presumably where library parts or macros had distant origin defined outside extent of marquee?)

If I could space click to a convoluted 3D surface, and/or adjust vertices to create a 3D marquee, and the corrupting library part issue was solved, then I would be happy,


Would still like to see the 3D ghosting feature though - a bit like MRI imaging - Next logical step beyond basic walkthroughs & good point of differnence compared with other packages. Great for cleaning up complex model junctions too.
PAUL KING | https://www.prime.net.nz
ArchiCAD 8-27 | Twinmotion 2023
Windoze 11 PC | Intel Core i9 10900K | Nvidia Gforce RTX 3080 | 32 Gb DDR3 | 2x4K monitor extended desktop
Paul wrote:
On anything larger than a house, scale of model in interface window is currently a significant problem, and requires many time consuming trial & error attempts to get right.

Ability to snap to elements & define offset for cutting plane would also be useful.
I agree with your points, but are you aware you can set the planes' Z dimensions precisely? (And X & Y, but who does that)

Rest the cursor in either of the top windows. Type Z. Enter the value and then return. This starts drawing the plane. Shift constrain, click the second point, choose the side, done.

HTH,
James Murray

Archicad 25 • Rill Architects • macOS • OnLand.info
Paul King
Advisor
Hi - a good suggestion, but for some reason, the minute I enter a known coordinate as a constraint, I loose the ability to see the resulting cut plane before confirming it - and I have not succeeded in doing anything useful despite several attempts this way - if anything worse than the previous "eyeball" trial & error method.

Is it different for you?


EDIT: - oops - I think the answer lies in typing the coordinate "z" rather than mouse clicking it - much more useful outcome! - thanks again
PAUL KING | https://www.prime.net.nz
ArchiCAD 8-27 | Twinmotion 2023
Windoze 11 PC | Intel Core i9 10900K | Nvidia Gforce RTX 3080 | 32 Gb DDR3 | 2x4K monitor extended desktop
Anonymous
Not applicable
Nice suggestion, Paul! I am totally with you!

I use cutting planes all the time when I have to model a large multistory building and want to concentrate on a detailed modelling of a certain part of it. By using cutting planes I do not nave to wait for regeneration of the whole model. 3d marque is not so good in such cases because when when copy/paste from floor to floor it disappears.
Anonymous
Not applicable
A fast way to set cut planes could be using section lines as reference. Specially on large projects. That way the cut plane would be exactly where you want them to be.
I'd like to click on it with the right mouse button (cmd+click on Mac I think) and have a option to configure the XY cut plane based on it. Fast and precise.
Djordje
Ace
avcamara wrote:
A fast way to set cut planes could be using section lines as reference. Specially on large projects. That way the cut plane would be exactly where you want them to be.
Use Section lines in 3D from the Special menu.

Use at your own risk!
Djordje



ArchiCAD since 4.55 ... 1995
HP Omen
jatassoc
Participant
Cutting plans that work like in SketchUp would be great.
R Muller
Enthusiast
Make 3D cutting planes easier to define.

Fix the 3D cutting planes dialog box so you can zoom in and see what you are doing to set a cutting plane graphically. Right now the images are so tiny they are useless. The only way to accurately set a horizontal cutting plane is to set the "Z" coordinate numerically, and ignore the unreadable diagrams in the dialog box.

OR, give us a way to set a horizontal cutting plane directly from the 3D window, and get rid of the cutting planes dialog box altogether.

(There seems to be no need for vertical cutting planes anyway, since we can use a marquee on the floor plan to create whatever sort of vertical cuts we need. The only cuts I ever wish to do with cutting planes are horizontal.)
R Muller
AC 26 USA (20+ years on ArchiCAD)
MBP 64GB Apple M1 Max OS 12.1 Monterey