In Rhino 8 a section is a live object. You place a clipping plane at 1.2 m, and Rhino gives you a 2D drawing of the cut, with hatches, the background linework behind it and a section style taken from your layers. Then you move the plane and the drawing moves with it. That one property changes how the plan sheet relates to the model. The plan stops being a copy you have to maintain. It becomes a view the model produces.

That essence came from one integration. On 27 June 2023 Rajaa Issa announced on the McNeel forum that “SectionTools is now fully integrated into Rhino 8 for Windows and Mac”. She added that Rhino 8 “supports creating drawings of sections and elevations of clipping planes that update with model changes.” Before that, SectionTools was a plug-in. After it, the cut, the hatch and the sheet sit in one chain: ClippingSections → ClippingDrawings → Layout → Print. This is evergreen material with no news hook. McNeel’s own Architectural Drawings guide walks the whole chain on a sample file, and this tutorial follows its values step by step.

Every office has redrawn a plan because a wall moved 300 mm. The wall had no opinion about it. You lost the afternoon.

←TODAY: Rhino 8 turns a clipping plane at 1.2 m into a hatched, dimensioned 1:150 sheet that updates with the model.
→3012: The drawings that survive are the ones that can be regenerated from an openly readable model, not the ones that were traced by hand.
Fulcrum: A plan you can regenerate is a plan you can trust to still be correct after the next design change.

The Tool

The Tool: Rhino 8’s clipping and drawing commands. These are the former SectionTools, folded into the core by McNeel’s development team, and shown in the Architectural Drawings user guide with its Drafting-Architectural.3dm sample model. You need no plug-in, no script and no add-on, only commands you already own. For a computational designer this is the missing last mile. The Grasshopper definition makes the building, and these commands make the drawing set without leaving the file.

Setup

Setup: Download Drafting-Architectural.3dm from the guide page linked below and open it in Rhino 8. Then type the following at the command line. Lines in brackets describe what you do with the mouse.

# Rhino 8 command line: one command per line, Enter after each
Open Drafting-Architectural.3dm
ClippingSections        [Enter = select all objects]
  Dir=CPlane            [switch from Dir=X]
  0,0,1.2               [Enter, Enter → cut at 1.2 m]
Flip                    [look down onto the plan, not up]
ClippingDrawings        [Point Osnap on, pick SEC_00]
  AddBackground=Yes ShowHatch=Yes Projection=Parallel
  AddHidden=Yes AddSilhouette=Yes ShowLabel=No
                        [snap a placement point behind the building]

If a flat drawing of the cut appears beside the model, the setup is proven. The walls are cut, the furniture below 1.2 m shows as background, and the drawing is still linked to SEC_00.

First steps

First steps:

1. Make the sheet. Run Layout and name it Floor Plan. Use the dialog settings the guide displays. Double-click into the Top detail, pan the drawing into place, then double-click to leave the detail.
2. Set the scale. Select the detail and open Properties > Detail. Set 1 cm on page = 1.5 m in model, which is 1:150, and tick Lock Viewport so a stray scroll cannot change the scale. The guide uses 1 cm = 1.2 m for the elevation and 1 cm = 1 m for the section. For SIA 400 sheets at 1:100 or 1:50, only these numbers change.
3. Dimension and style it. On the Drafting tab, run Dim, snap to the roof ends and type 6 for the offset. Run it again with Continue=yes to chain the dimensions. In the Layer panel, click None in the Section Style column and give one layer a hatch. The guide uses Hatch2, rotation 45, pattern scale 0.1 and boundary width scale 2. As Wim Dekeyser put it on the McNeel forum on 11 October 2023, “By default, an object’s section style is set to By Layer”. That means one layer setting styles every wall on that layer.
4. Move it, update it, print it. Drag the clipping plane and the drawing follows. After a geometry edit, run UpdateClippingDrawings. McNeel’s Intro to Dynamic Drawings says this is “by design to help make multiple edits to your model and update the drawings all at once.” Then go to the Layouts panel, right-click Floor Plan and choose Print…. Pick RhinoPDF, Use Layout Page Size, Vector Output and 1:1, and set linetype widths in model lengths.

The trade-off: the drawing refreshes when you ask it to, not on every edit. Batch your changes, then run the update before you print. If you forget, the sheet shows the building as it was an hour ago.

Issa’s 7 June 2023 note describes how deep the styling goes. A Section Style “includes hatch, fill and boundary settings” and can come By Layer, By Parent, By Clipping Plane or Custom, and MatchProperties copies a style onto other objects. When a single object needs to stand out, set it to Custom with a Plus hatch at pattern scale 0.5.

Atelier

Atelier: For a small Zürich studio working in Rhino, the plan sheet is where model changes most often fail to reach the drawings, because someone has to redraw it. A live cut moves that work back into the model. The cost is discipline: layers have to carry meaning, because the hatch comes from the layer. Monday move: put one live project’s walls, slabs and columns on clean layers, give each a section style, and produce Tuesday’s coordination plan from a ClippingDrawing instead of an export.

Hack

Hack: Before you type a scale into the Detail properties, check that the plan fits the paper. The relationship is simple arithmetic: 1 cm on paper = s m in the model means a scale of 1:(s × 100), and the sheet width times that factor is how much building fits across it.

sheet_mm = 420  # A3 landscape width
for s in (1.0, 1.2, 1.5):  # metres per paper-cm: section, elevation, plan
    ratio = s * 100
    print('1 cm = %.1f m -> 1:%d | A3 holds %.0f m' % (s, ratio, sheet_mm / 1000 * ratio))

At 1:150 an A3 sheet holds 63 m of plan. If the building is longer than that, change the scale or the paper size before you place the detail.

Further on

Grasshopper users are covered too. On 28 January 2026 Andy Payne announced clipping plane support in Grasshopper 1, “building on Rhino 8’s powerful SectionTools”. It is still in BETA. For the full picture, Issa’s Master Class: Sectioning Workflows in Rhino on the McNeel wiki (last modified 15 August 2025) runs 15 chapters and about 2 hours, with a model zip and a PDF of notes. PAZ is a Rhino centre in Switzerland, and our Rhino 8 training and licences are where this drawing chain becomes office routine. 39 Building System Specialists have already learned to treat the model as the source and every drawing as something derived from it.

From the late 2070s, here is what I would pack. Keep the model readable and the sheets vector. A PDF from a regenerable cut is evidence anyone can open. A plan that only exists as hand-traced linework is a drawing nobody can repair.

Learn-it:

• McNeel: Architectural Drawings guide (with Drafting-Architectural.3dm)
• McNeel: Intro to Dynamic Drawings
• McNeel: Intro to Section Styles
• Rajaa Issa: Master Class, Sectioning Workflows in Rhino
• McNeel forum: SectionTools integrated into Rhino 8
• PAZ note: save the cut, not the drawing. If you can regenerate a sheet, you never have to defend it.

Open the sample file today, cut it at 1.2 m, and print your first live plan before you redraw anything by hand again.