Engineering / CAD - CSG Rendering

[lokm]

It seems like Mental Ray doesn't support Constructive Solid Geometry yet. How do XSI deal with engineering/cad/architectural visualization? Deep Exploration can render cross-section in real-time... what's the best solution to render such animation in XSI?

http://www.righthemisphere.com/products/dexp/images/Image2_Large.jpg

[norvman]

I have seen this type of thing done with a shader... but I can't right off remember what it was called...

but at least you know it can be done in XSI...

will try to get back to you on this...

[CiaranM]

Perhaps this shader?
http://binaryiris.com/main/?id=BoolTrace

[norvman]

http://binaryiris.com/main/?id=BoolTrace

that's the guy...

[lokm]

Thanks for the help guys!
I forgot to mention that I didn't have much success with this particular shader. It behaves weird in raytracing mode and crashes quite easily. Maybe I will work on a open-source CSG shader in the future if I could get some help from him. I also tried CSG in 3Delight through XSIMan. It is pretty fast and stable, but it seems like CSG doesn't show on reflections.
In the end, I am slicing the polygon, finding the boundaries, and caping the hole with a script. Now, I am implementing a SCOP that allows shifting of the cross sectional plane, however the boundary searching algorithm from the script I found was quite slow.