Cut Plane is a recently released add-on for Blender that enables users to cut meshes with a plane. It is an Edit Mode tool where users position a plane with a gizmo, and the mesh is bisected along it. What makes the tool particularly interesting is its interactive workflow, allowing the results to be viewed in real time before committing to the cut.
The tool can serve a variety of use cases. In game development, it can be particularly useful for destructive and procedural environment modeling, allowing artists to quickly create ramps, wedges, sloped platforms, and irregular boundaries. It can also be used to create destruction props such as damaged pillars, severed pipes, collapsed architectural pieces, destroyed statues, and more.
The tool's gizmo works in a similar fashion to Blender's regular editing gizmo, featuring move arrows, three rotation dials, a view dial, a trackball, and scale handles. Regular keyboard shortcuts therefore work as they do in other parts of Blender.
The tool also includes several additional features, including cutting options for filling the cross-section or clearing the inner or outer side of the mesh. Cutting can also be restricted to selected geometry and snapped to the grid, with numeric input available for adjustments.
In addition, the tool includes mirror functionality, where mirrored copies of the plane are reflected across the object's origin. The cutting plane can be expanded into two, four, or eight mirrored planes, with grey ghost planes showing where the mirrored cuts will occur. The ghost planes can also be disabled via an eye icon.
The project's documentation also explains that the real-time cutting preview is not an approximation of the result, but a real bisect of the mesh. The cut is recomputed as the plane is rotated or moved, with the original mesh restored when leaving the tool or Edit Mode.
Cut Plane is compatible with Blender 4.5 or newer. The add-on is available for free through its official GitHub repository.
