Box Widget

The box widget can be enabled and disabled by the pyvista.Plotter.add_box_widget() and pyvista.Plotter.clear_box_widgets() methods respectively. When enabling the box widget, you must provide a custom callback function otherwise the box would appear and do nothing - the callback functions are what allow us to leverage the widget to perform a task like clipping/cropping.

Considering that using a box to clip/crop a mesh is one of the most common use cases, we have included a helper method that will allow you to add a mesh to a scene with a box widget that controls its extent, the pyvista.Plotter.add_mesh_clip_box() method.

import pyvista as pv
from pyvista import examples

mesh = examples.download_nefertiti()

p = pv.Plotter()
p.add_mesh_clip_box(mesh, color='white')
p.show(cpos=[-1, -1, 0.2])

After interacting with the scene, the clipped mesh is available as:

p.box_clipped_meshes

[UnstructuredGrid (0x7fd36bdda920)
  N Cells:    2018232
  N Points:   1009118
  X Bounds:   -1.194e+02, 1.194e+02
  Y Bounds:   -1.813e+02, 1.813e+02
  Z Bounds:   -2.473e+02, 2.473e+02
  N Arrays:   1]