FreeCAD News

There are lots of ways to adjust the view of objects in the pre­view win­dow but a sim­ple one, that is often over­looked, is the Clip­ping View tool.

We’ve just made a sim­ple object, a fusion of two cylin­ders and a cube on the part work­bench, to explore the clip­ping view func­tions. Note that the clip­ping view dia­logue is avail­able from any FreeCAD work­bench and you can launch it by left click­ing on “View → Clip­ping View”.

Once launched you’ll see the “Clip­ping” dia­logue win­dow with tick box­es to enable clip­ping views for the X Y and Z axis as well as a cus­tom views option. Tick the “Clip­ping X” tick box and you should see that the default off­set val­ue clips the view in the X axis so that the 10mm cube fusion object is cut in half. You could of course rotate the view to see inside the fusion object, but equal­ly we can click the “Flip” but­ton and it revers­es the clip­ping view rel­a­tive to the select­ed axis.

We can of course adjust the off­set val­ues to adjust the posi­tion of the clipped view and indeed we can switch to dif­fer­ent axis. Untick­ing the “Clip­ping X” tick box and tick­ing the “Clip­ping Z” tick box for exam­ple allows us to clip the view in the Z axis, remov­ing the top of our object.

Note thought that it’s total­ly pos­si­bly to have mul­ti­ple clip­ping views inter­act­ing by, for exam­ple, tick­ing both the Clip­ping X and the Clip­ping Z tick box­es to remove more exte­ri­or sec­tions of our object or part and dial in the view we require.

Final­ly, We can use the “Cus­tom Clip­ping Direc­tion” tick box to enable more com­plex view options. As well as set­ting the off­set val­ue you can input direc­tion val­ues to change the ori­en­ta­tion of the cus­tom clip­ping plane. Anoth­er use­ful fea­ture is to tick the “Adjust to view direc­tion” tick box. This takes the cur­rent ori­en­ta­tion of the pre­view win­dow and makes it the clip­ping view plane. You can then adjust the off­set or indeed you can manip­u­late the ori­en­ta­tion of the object in the pre­view window.

What­ev­er clip­ping view you have used, when ready you can sim­ply click the “Close” but­ton in the clip­ping dia­logue to close the dia­logue and return to your stan­dard view.