Overview

With SOLIDWORKS Visualize 2021, we have added the ability to display cut plane “caps”. 

Whereas previously a cut plane in visualize would always show geometry as hollow, you can now add a solid color capping plane.

Here is the old behavior of cut planes shown on a simple cylinder:

In Visualize 2021, when viewing the properties of a Cut Plane, there is a small section called “Global Properties”.  The use of the word “global” here is quite intentional and will be explained in a moment.  Meanwhile, this is where you will find the new options for “Display Cut Plane Caps” and a “Cap Color” color selector:

If we enable the “Display Cut Plane Caps” option we see the following change:

Changing the Cap Color to red we see the following:

Let us turn on some additional geometry to see the overall effect in a bit more detail:

Let's go back to the “Global Properties” section.  Even though the ability to enable and disable the caps, and their color, are presented to you on the selection of any given cut plane in the scene, the state of the cut planes being on/off and their color, is global to the entire scene and any cut planes that are visible.

Therefore, if we add another cut plane to this model, to cut the top half of everything, we get the following:

If we change the color of the cap plane under either of the Cut Plane properties, the cap color changes for both cut planes in the scene.

Limitations

There are a couple known issues or limitations worth pointing out. 

The first has to do with seeing some z-fighting type artifacts, when the cap is being displayed around separate parts that are coincident.  This is a common issue in ray traced section capping since the algorithm needs to know which surface is in front of, or behind another, and determine it strictly by ray casting.  When you have coincident surfaces, this determination cannot be made consistently.  We can see this effect in the example of the Holmatro model used here.  Many internal parts have cylindrical parts which are precisely coincident with another part:

In a “proper” model, this may not occur since the model would be made with very small clearances between these parts.  If you do encounter this, the only workaround is to try to scale/move some parts a very small amount (e.g. 0.001).  In this case, I was able to select a few of the parts and either scale them or move them just slightly, to get rid of most of the issue.

The second limitation, is that section caps are not supported/displayed in Preview render mode.  If you switch to Preview mode, you’ll still see the geometry without any cap on the cutting plane.

Conclusion

Hopefully this new feature will provide some benefit to folks.  We do have a list of items we’re also considering and hoping to support in the future as additional enhancements to cutting planes.  Including, but not limited to, things like using any appearance on a cap, crosshatching, separate caps per cut plane, cutting with other geometry (blocks, spheres, arbitrary geometry) and more.

Happy testing!