How to Get Rid of Geometry Obscuring Grey on Blender?

[Jennifer_P]

Alright, so you know the Blender feature where when you're viewing your models and they're on the large side, it will cut off pieces that are further away with a sort of invisible gray plane? And when you zoom out, it will go from showing you a full screen view to showing just gray nothingness (perhaps with a few hilltops poking out)? Well, it's beginning to annoy me, and I was wondering if anyone knows how to turn it off or at least alleviate its effects? I would be MOST grateful.

[Nadnerb]

View > View Properties will bring up a little dialog box with the view properties. What you want is "Clip End". That speicifes the clipping distance, or the z depth of this invisible plane that marks the farthest away from the camera objects will be drawn. Set it to a higher value to see more.

In blender 2.5, the max value is 10000. (default 500)

[Jennifer_P]

Thank you SOOOOOOO much! Ahh, it feels very good to have that gone at last!

[Grogyan]

In a couple of attempts at viewing Cyan's Ages especially sphere 4, the 10000 limit isn't enough and is completely useless if you're trying to see something in 1st POV

[Trylon]

try making the grid size larger, that allows for larger limiting settings

[Aloys]

It's one of those Blender things that just doesn't make sense anyway you slice it... Why limit the distance of the clipping plane? Why not allow it to go to 10 millions or something??.
I've seen that request countless times on blender boards yet noone seem to tackle the problem..

[Trylon]

Yeah, it's just plain weird...

[Robert The Rebuilder]

I think it has to do with the granularity of the Z-buffer. Typically, the recommendation is to have your near plane set to 1/1000th of your far plane distance. Otherwise, it is difficult for the rendering hardware to distinguish between the distance of two nearby objects. This results in "z-fighting", or when two parallel planes render on top of each other. Having more bits available in your z-buffer helps, and having the precision of your "far/near ratio" (i.e. near plane distance vs. your far plane distance) not exceed 3 digits also helps.

Here's a link to more information about this.

[Aloys]

Oh... interesting, I was not aware of that granularity concept, I had no idea that the value of a zBuffer were evenly distributed.. Now that I think of it it seems obvious (and that explains the far/near ratio in Blender). Interesting, thanks for the link. (one of these days I should really take a couple weeks to dabble into the actual mathematical guts of 3D rendering.. there are days when I can barely recall what a matrix is.. )

Now about Blender.. That is annoying; and there's no way to fix it.. For Ahra Pahts I have to use a spacing of 1 for my grid which is very annoying because I use the grid a lot and I often have to lower the pacing for some specific operations and then I have to raise it again to see past 3 shells..

[Chacal]

Speaking of things users have been clamoring for for a long time: support for multiple monitors!