My standard when viewing a building section is to view *only* what the section line is cutting through – not the elements beyond. For this reason, after placing the section in plan view, I drag the bounding box line that represents the far clip offset really close (technical term) to the section line. I don’t see a way to set it to a distance of zero, so I just zoom in and eyeball it (technical term that comes from using Revit). The problem this causes is that where the section cuts through a toposurface the cut fill will not display.
When I increased the far clip offset to 1″ the cut pattern became visible. It turns invisible when the far clip offset is set to any value smaller than 0.89″ in fact. This seems to me to be a bug with the toposurface entity, since none of the other cut patterns in the model behave this way – they are consistently visible. Hopefully this tip will save somebody some time. I won’t say how much time it would have saved me because it’s just too darn embarrassing.
Daily Occurrence 
Have you considered using framing elevations for this purpose?
While they will still have the same issue with a far clip offset less than 1″, unlike sections their default visibilty settings prevent them from showing hidden elements beyond regardless of the view discipline setting, which appears to be just the look your going for. In tight situations with multiple elements in very close proximity to the cut line these tend to be more efficient.
Doesn’t setting the Visual Style to Hidden Line hide elements beyond? After some basic testing, I don’t see any difference between the views generated by Framing Elevations and Building Sections, except that Framing Elevations actually can have a far clip offset of 0, but do not have the option to ‘Split Segment.’ Like you said, the topo pattern still goes away, unfortunately. Thanks for the tip!
You might only notice a difference in the framing elevations and sections with specific view discipline settings. This may only be applicable for Revit Structure users (whom typically assign a “structural” discipline to sections and framing elevations) With this view discipline enabled and the visual style set to “Hidden Line” framing elevations will omit hidden elements, but the live sections will not. Setting the view discipline to anything other than “Structural” with a visual style set to “Hidden Line” will produce framing elevations and live sections that both omit hidden elements.
Just found your Blog. Great tips. Love the snow effect on your pic and text (I’m looking at this on Christmas morning :))
Revit drives me nuts sometime. If an object is cut by a cut plane, show it with a cut display. Geesh. (ref. walls less than 5′ tall.)
Merry Christmas and keep up the good work.
Thanks Erik! I follow your blog too. .-) I have been super busy lately so I haven’t blogged, which is probably why I fell off Steve Stafford’s list… Stay tuned, though. I have a bunch of drafts that I’m getting ready to post.