Section planes: cut the model open

A section plane cuts the model open, so you can see and work inside it: a floor plan of a house, the inside of a cabinet. The model is not changed; the cut is only a view.

Place one

1. Click Section in the Camera group.
2. Click a face. The plane is placed on that face, with four arrows pointing at you.

Click away from any face for a plane square to the direction you look in most. Press an arrow key first to stand it square to red (→→), green (←←) or blue (↑↑) instead.

The side the arrows point at is cut away. A plane placed on a face cuts nothing yet: slide it into the model.

Slide it, reverse it, turn it off

Click the plane's outline to select it. In Entity info:

• Along its arrows says where it sits. Type a new distance and press ReturnEnter to slide it through the model; typing -1m on a plane you placed on a front face moves it 1 m into the model.
• Reverse turns the arrows round, so the other side is cut away.
• Active (cuts the model): one plane cuts at a time. Tick another plane's box, or place a new one, and that one cuts instead.
• Rename it in Name; delete it with fn DeleteDelete or the Eraser.

Where the plane passes through a closed solid, the cut is filled in a dark color. Geometry that is not closed (a single face, an open box) is cut but not filled.

Show and hide

In Views:

• Show section planes hides the planes' outlines and arrows (the cut stays).
• Show section cuts turns the cut off and shows the whole model, without deleting the planes.

Presentation view hides the outlines too.

Things to know

• What is cut away cannot be clicked or snapped to, so you can draw on what the cut shows.
• Section planes, which one is active and the two switches are saved in the ModelCraft file. Each change is one undo step.
• Exports always contain the whole model: a section is a view, not an edit.