Circumstances might arise in which you want to clip portions of the graphical view. Two major examples include:
Removing data (such as point cloud data) outside of a region in order to simplify the view. This may be done for reporting reasons (to obtain a clear screenshot for a report) or just to be able to more easily work in the view. For example, if you have point cloud scans of the inside and outside of a building, you might clip away the near “wall” so that you can view the data on the inside of the building without also seeing the wall data.
Displaying a “section cut”. You might do this to “cut away” portions of your CAD or data in order to display only a region of interest, as shown below:
A clipping region is defined by a box that can be moved or have any of its sides scaled along a coordinate direction. The orientation of the region (its rotation in space) can be defined by any object, and each of the six faces of the box can have clipping enabled or disabled.
To Set A Clipping Region:
Clipping planes or entities can be defined and edited graphically by interacting with the dotted that is built when a clipping plane is defined. To do so follow these steps:
From the Home tab, select Display>Clipping Planes (or press Alt-X). This will open the Clipping Entities control dialog.
In the Clipping Entities dialog, click the Add button.
Select any object to define the initial position and orientation of the clipping box. The base frame of this selected object will be used to define the location and orientation of the clipping definition.
Clipping begins with a single plane, the XY plane of the base from of the selected object. However, clipping can be enabled for multiple planes at once. To enable additional planes, mouse over the center of a face of the dotted clipping box (it will turn black) and click it to toggle that face’s clipping plane status on or off.
The size and placement of the plane can also be adjusted by adjusting the size of the clipping box. Mouse over the center of any edge (an icon will appear) and drag to move the clipping region along that edge’s direction. You can also mouse over the end of any edge and drag to grow or shrink the region along that edge’s direction.
When you’re happy with your region, click the Close button, or leave the dialog open if desired.
To Assign Numeric Boundaries to a Clipping Region:
The clipping plane or entity definitions that are displayed graphically but can also be edited numerically by clicking on the edit button:
Each plane is defined and labeled relative to the axis its normal represents. This means that the plane that lies on the XY plane of the reference frame is labeled the Z axis plane. A low value and a high value can be enabled for each axis so effectively two clipping planes can be enabled per axis using the check boxes. All graphical entities that lie beyond these clipping extents will be hidden. When all the check boxes are enabled the clipping zone will be a fully enclosed box and the only thing visible in the graphics will be what is within this box.
The Clipping Entities dialog includes the ability to define multiple clipping objects. This can be useful if you wish to set up clipping planes at angles to one another. Use the angle between the objects to control the angle at which the clipping planes are defined.
When graphical clipping is being performed an indicator is added to the coordinate direction indicator to show this:
Clipping planes can be enabled as follows:
They can be directly accessed through the View Clipping button (ALT+X)
They can be linked to and activated by callout views by defining the clipping definitions within the callout properties.
They can also be used by point clouds for cloud processing and filtering applications.