# How to properly clip and cut multiple actors

**URL:** https://discourse.vtk.org/t/how-to-properly-clip-and-cut-multiple-actors/4504
**Category:** Support
**Created:** [October 28, 2020, 9:31am UTC](https://discourse.vtk.org/t/how-to-properly-clip-and-cut-multiple-actors/4504 "2020-10-28T09:31:04Z")
**Posts on this page:** 1
**Showing post:** 2

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### Author: ![lassoan](https://discourse.vtk.org/user_avatar/discourse.vtk.org/lassoan/32/50_2.png) [@lassoan](https://discourse.vtk.org/u/lassoan)
#### Post date: [October 28, 2020, 12:23pm UTC](https://discourse.vtk.org/t/how-to-properly-clip-and-cut-multiple-actors/4504/2 "2020-10-28T12:23:48Z")

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As far as I understand, you problem is that each cut faces overlap.

You can solve this at the rendering level, ensuring that the cut plane is just slightly closer to the camera for the embedded actors. This requires almost no change in your code and performance will be the same as now.

If you cut with a single plane then you can use [vtkPlaneCutter](https://vtk.org/doc/nightly/html/classvtkPlaneCutter.html#ad77ca76dbaa8c4a0d6d595d9d17bb96c), which is probably faster. For each polydata, you can turn the embedded polydata (the next nested polydata) inside out and pass it to the cutter.

The vtkContourTriangulator can cut out holes, too, so probably all you need to do is for each polydata to append the cross section of the next embedded polydata.

If you generate the contours from a labelmap volume then you may also consider displaying cross-sections directly using volume rendering, which might be several magnitudes faster if you have many segments or the segments are complex (e.g., not drawn by hand but created by thresholding a somewhat noisy image).

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