Using clipping planes for "cut-away" renderings?

[haikai]

i need to render a cut-away view of a ship exposing the interior details. my first approach to this problem was to simply adjust the near clipping plane of the camera until it fell somewhere in the middle of the ship model. i quickly realized that this wasn't going to work because the cut-away "line" should go straight down the ship (from bow to stern), but i need to render at an angle and the clipping plane naturally remains perpendicular to the camera which results in it clipping out the wrong areas of the ship.

am i approaching this the wrong way or is there actually a way to "rotate" a camera's clipping planes? my last resort is to physically chop the model in half, but since it's a fairly complex model, i would like to avoid doing this. any suggestions are welcome!

hai

EDIT: i just noticed this post: http://www.highend3d.com/boards/showthreaded.php?Cat=1,2&Board=mayarender&Number=168157&page=&view=&sb=&o=

it sounds very similar to my problem. will give it a try, but i hope someone out there knows of a simpler method of doing this.

[joojaa]

It is a simple solution! And no there isnt going to be a simpler solution unless you boolan. (wich may or may not work depending on if you were carefull to make booleanable geo in fort place.)

Boolean offcourse makes for a nice fill.

If its any consolidation mr and prman can do this but maya has no facilities for this in mr.

As a alternatrive you could edit the bounding boxes off your objects to reflect this! then it would also be clipped if you dont use maya renderer.

[neko]

Is there way to provide the camera projection matrix in Mental Ray or the Maya renderer? If you can set this matrix directly, then you do a little math and get a free arbitrary clipping plane.

I have no idea how to set the matrix directly, however.

[joojaa]

its part of the camera space (actualy its jsut 2 stored values not a matrix of itself)! if you chage it you change the came placemaent and vice versa.

[neko]

Yes, I'm aware that you can specifiy the near and far clip planes. I want access to the projection matrix so I can specify the near clipping plane to no longer be parallel to the viewport plane.

[joojaa]

You cant they inherit the space of your camera (se they dont have a matrix of thir own)! that would turn the camera, they just cant be separated.