In addition to the below content, see also: Corona Slicer Material at Chaos Docs
With the Corona Slicer Material, you can use any object in your scene to cut away parts of another object where they intersect. This is a render-time effect so it will not change the actual geometry.
You can slice through all of your scene objects, or only through some of them.
This is how the original objects look in the viewport.
In this case, we are placing half of a cylinder with a Corona Slicer Material applied to it to cut away every object that is intersecting with it, allowing us to see the inner parts of the original model.
This is the resulting image after cutting through all the original objects using the Corona Slicer Material applied to the half of a cylinder.
Where to find it?
You can create a Corona Slicer Material by any of the following methods:
A. Open the Corona menu located in the Material Editor and choose the Slicer Material:
B. Open the Node Material Editor, then Right-click > New material > Slicer Material:
Corona Slicer Material Parameters
| Option | Description |
| Caps | |
| Enable | This enables or disables generating caps for the sliced geometry. |
| Use cap material | This enables or disables the cap material specified in the "Material" slot. If disabled, the original object's material will be used for the caps. |
| Material | In this slot, you can define the material for the capped surface. It can be enabled or disabled using the "Use cap material" checkbox. |
| Include/Exclude | |
| Include/exclude list | Use this list to include or exclude scene objects that will be affected by the slicing geometry. If the mode is set to Exclude and the list is empty, the Slicer material will slice any object intersecting with it. |
| Include Children | If the slicing geometry is a group (using a null object as the parent) or an object that contains nested elements, enabling this option will include them all if you assign the Corona Slicer Material to the group (null object) or parent geometry. |
Using the Corona Slicer Material
After applying a Corona Slicer Material to an object (we can refer to it as the "slicer geometry"), you can place it so that it intersects with other objects in your scene. The intersecting parts will be sliced off.
Steps:
1. Create any geometry and make sure it is intersecting with one or more objects in your scene; we will call this the "slicer geometry".
2. Create a Corona Slicer Material and assign it to the slicer geometry.
3. Now, at render time, the parts of the objects that are intersecting with the slicer geometry will be sliced off and only the remaining parts will be rendered.
Corona Slicer Material examples:
Example A
Here we will be using the Corona Slicer Material to slice off a part of a teapot.
General Scene description:
The scene contains a simple teapot and a stretched cube, and they were placed intersecting with each other. The Corona Slicer Material is assigned to the stretched cube:
Example A - Expected result
In this case, the teapot will be sliced and the resulting geometry will remain OPEN until you turn on the "Enable" checkbox for the "Caps" section in the Corona Slicer Material:
Example A - Render:
Example A - Material Setup:
Example B - Expected result
In this case, the teapot is sliced, and the color of the "slicer geometry" is used for the caps:
Example B - Render:
Example B - Material Setup:
Note: For this example, please consider that you should turn on the "Display color" option and define a color for the slicing geometry, otherwise, the default gray color will be applied.
Example C - Expected result
In this case, the teapot object is sliced, and the surface is using the material defined in the Corona Slicer "Material" section:
Example C - Render:
Example C - Material Setup:
Example D - Expected result
In this case, by disabling the "Use cap material" checkbox, the teapot will be sliced, and the material of the teapot will be used for the capped surface:
Example D - Render:
Example D - Material Setup:
Example E - Expected result
So far you may have noticed that as the Corona Slicer material visually cuts away part of the objects, the overall lighting is now visible for the inner parts of the objects, but there might be some special cases where you want to keep the shadows like for example in architectural visualization.
To achieve this result, let's do the following:
- Apply a Corona Ray Switcher Material to the Slicing geometry
- Create a Corona Slicer Material and connect it to the "Directly visible" input section of the Corona Ray Switcher Material
- Enable the "Caps" option for the Slicer material, and disable the "Cap material" option.
Now, the objects will be sliced off, the material of the original objects will be assigned to the capped surface, and the interior lighting and shadows will remain as if the objects weren't sliced.
Example E - Scene Setup:
Example E - Render:
Example E - Material Setup:
Example F - Expected result
In this example, the slicing geometry is using a Corona Slicer Material but this time the edges of the caps are rounded because of using the Corona Round Edges shader for both the Base material and the Caps material.
Example F - Scene Setup:
Example F - Material Setup:
Example G - Expected result
In this example, we want to show you that the Corona Slicer material can be also used to cutting out a Corona Proxy, objects used in a Chaos Scatter, and objects used by a Mograph's Cloner.
Example G - Scene Setup:
Additional Examples
Example H - Scene setup
Example H - Render:
Example H - Material Setup:
Troubleshooting
1. Using Corona Light Material in the slicer material may lead to black appearance on caps
Solution: use a material with self-illumination enabled instead.
See: Should I use Corona Light material or Self Illumination to illuminate my scene?
Example:
Material Setup:
| The viewport shows the geometry. | The material setup. |
2. The displacement in the material included in the slicer material will be ignored.
Solution: do not use displacement in the cap material as it is currently unsupported. Use bump instead, or nothing at all.
See also: