Arbitrary clipping planes is a feature unique to 3Delight for Softimage that lets you clip away a half-space that is not necessary aligned with the camera (as it is the case with far and near clipping planes). Meaning that one side of the clipping plane will be completely trimmed away. The main usage of this feature is to visualize the interior of objects (cross-sectional rendering). To create an arbitrary clipping plane:

1. Create an Implicit Square.
2. Attach a Clipping Planes property to the implicit square (see section Clipping Planes Properties).
3. Enable the Use As Clipping Plane check box.

Everything on the positive side (Z+ in local space) of the plane will be trimmed away. To trim the opposite side, you can either:

1. Put a scale of -1 on the Z axis of the implicit square.
2. In the Clipping Planes property of the 3Delight Attribute, enable the Invert Clipping Direction flag.

Some notes about the arbitrary clipping planes:

• The trimming honors the quality settings, so the cut line will be nicely anti-aliased.
• They also work with motion-blur.
• Geometry that is trimmed away will be unloaded from memory for more efficient rendering.
• There is no limit on the number of such clipping planes in a given scene.