A clipping plane is a planar slice through a 3D mesh. EnSight's clipping operation can take arbitrary cuts through either structured or unstructured meshes. The clip can be based on EnSight's plane tool, and as such can be infinite in extent (at least to the bounds of the parts it is created from) or restricted to the bounds of the Plane tool. The nodes of the resulting clipping plane can be based on the topology and resolution of the underlying mesh or sampled on a regular grid according to the plane tool.

There is an option that allows for a clip plane part to be created where there is no existing mesh. This will create a new set of nodes and elements.

A clip can also be created by specifying the node id of three nodes. When node ids are used, the plane will be infinite in extent and will stay tied to those three nodes - even if they move in a changing geometry model.

Besides creating the intersection of a plane through a domain, which is the normal mode for clipping, a clipping plane can also be used to create parts which are what would result from a cut of its parent domain into front (inside) and or back (outside) parts. These parts contain valid elements of the same order as the original domain parts.

Like other clip tools, clipping planes can be interactively manipulated with the mouse providing a powerful volume visualization capability. Clipping planes can also be automatically animated to display results throughout a region of space or over time.