Boolean Material - Cross Sections - Cutaway Plane

[stoobz]

Hi!
I was hoping, that the possibility to do cross sections / cutaway planes would be in version 7, but as it turns out not yet.

Some of you seem to have found a workaround to do that, can anybody please explain to me, how I can do this inside the Keyshot 7 software?

Thanks for any help!!

[mattjgerard]

You can use a thin gradient in the opacity map to make part of the material (and thusly object) transparent. Only real issue with this is that you won't get the closing surface where the cut is made.  If you look at this image, thats exactly what I did here, but I tweaked the camera angle so you can't see the edges of the cut. If you did see them, it would show the object is hollow, which is not what you want. There are no actual boolean operations avaialbe in KS 7, they are (hopefully) going to be introduced in KS8. There was a demo at Renderworld, and it looked really promising.

Otherwise in the second image, which is part of an animation of the cutaway process, I did the cut and animation in Cinema 4d, which has boolean and cutaway tools in it, exported the alembic and imported into KS, retextured and rendered out the framestack.  Worked pretty well, just be sure to match the frame rate of the alembic export to your timeline in KS or you will get all sorts of jumpy goofyness.

[stoobz]

Hey Mattjgerard,

thanks alot for the tip - will try it out
Cheers!!