Sectioning a model

There are up to 6 section planes enabled at one time, but there is only one that is active. The section plane that is active is numbered in the drop down box. However, you can link section planes together to form slices.

The Sectioning toolbar is shown above. To open it,

• Go to View, Control Bars, Sectioning

or

• Click Sectioning on the Workspace toolbar.

Manipulating the active section plane

1. Choose the plane that you wish to manipulate using the numbered drop down. In this drop down, there will always be one more than the number of enabled section planes in the scene, up to a maximum of 6.

2. Set the Step Size by clicking on the step size button. This brings up a dialog box allowing a Step Size to be enabled and set to a user-definable size. This size is then used when moving the section planes. If the Step Size is disabled, the section planes will move at percentage intervals.

3. Switch this plane on or off by clicking the section toggle button.

4. Once switched on, choose one of the 7 planes that this section plane will cut. You have the choice of

   • Align Viewpoint This will align the plane parallel with the current viewpoint.

   • Align Bottom

   • Align Top

   • Align Front

   • Align Back

   • Align Left

   • Align Right

   Note

   Each plane for each section remembers its position, so the slider will move when you choose another plane.

5. Move the slider to interactively position the section plane to the required location. The number in the edit box shows the position of the section plane from the origin and will be updated when moving the section plane. You can also type in the location of the origin in this edit box for exact positioning of the plane.

   Note

   You can also use the cursor keys and mouse wheel for simple sliding of the section plane through the model.

6. Clicking on the Set Range button helps you to set a finer resolution for sectioning large models. What this button does is limit the range of the section planes to the bounding box limits of the currently selected items. For more information on selecting items, see . Clicking this button with nothing selected reset the section range to the limits of the whole model, which is the default.

7. If you have more than one section plane enabled, you can delete this active plane using the delete button . The next enabled plane will then become the active plane.