Tool: Side View

The Side View tool provides an intuitive way to zoom the view and to control the near and far clipping planes, which always remain perpendicular to the line of sight. For rotatable (front and back) clipping planes, see the clip command. See also: cofr, zoom, camera, mousemode

The Side View can be opened from the Tools menu or by clicking the Graphics icon . Like other tools, it can be moved, resized, etc.

• The square on the left represents the viewer or eye position. It can be dragged horizontally to adjust the zoom.
  
  
• The vertical lines represent the near and far clipping planes. Dragging either line activates (as needed) and moves the corresponding plane.
  
  
• The lines emanating from the eye position show the field of vision. The lines diverge when perspective is used (default), but are parallel to each other in the orthographic camera mode.

The clip checkboxes indicate whether the near and/or far clipping planes are active.

If the interactive response becomes slow with very large structures or other copious or large data, closing the Side View may help by reducing the rendering load.

Capping of clipped surfaces can be controlled with a preference setting and/or the surface cap command.