Sectioning for Fabrication
New in 8

Clipping planes can be used to extract sections through your model to use in prototyping and fabrication processes such as laser cutting. You can also extract slices of a big model to fabricate using CNC routers or 3D printers.

Extract Curves for Laser Cutting

Flat cut processes such as laser cutting require you to extract parallel cuts through your model, label them, and lay them on a flat sheet. Rhino supports workflows to extract labeled cuts through 3D models to help with these processes.

“Extract Curves for Laser Cutting”

Try It

  1. Download Rhino 8 Evaluation for Windows or Mac.

  2. Download and open the ExtractForFabrication-Demo.3dm model.

  3. In the Front view, select the clipping plane tagged with the name C_00. It’s important to note that this clipping plane was created with the new ClippingSections command with option Name=C.

  4. Run Array command in the Front view. Set the YNumber to 24 and YSpacing=0.565. Rhino creates 23 new clipping planes and serializes their names so that each clipping plane has a unique new number (C_00 to C_23).

  5. Switch to the Top viewport, and run the NestedClippingDrawing command. Select all your clipping planes and set Spacing=0.1, Width=10, Label=On, LabelTag=Text and LabelLocation=Inside. Place your output anywhere on the XY-plane. Note that you can post process to remove additional curves and change label size. “Extract Nested Drawing”

  6. Ask questions and give feedback on the Discourse Forum.