Render Booleans/Clipper/Cut-Away Effect

It would be amazing if we could have native Blender/Cycles ability to clip away/exclude rays of objects within a collection and then animate the effect using input geometry such as a plane, cube or custom object. By extension render booleans would also be cool, similar to how the bevel node creates the illusion of geometry which would be difficult to create with real polygons.

This is common in product and architectural visualisation where it might be necessary to look inside a complex assembly.

I recently needed to create a side view of a car with the doors cutaway as well as the passenger seat. Due to the complex hierarchy involved, I needed to do a lot of prep work to ensure I split things sympathetically in the master asset so that I could render all the passes needed to achieve this effect in comp.

If rendertime clipping were possible, then I could achieve this effect agnostic of the hierarchy.

A potential interim/simplified version of this could simply be "per collection" camera clipping or potentially a light ray style masking node to mix based on a specific objects occlusion.

Simply changing the near clipping of a camera does hide geometry from render without having to organise the hierarchy in a particular way and then hide. Creating a collection to include/exclude these objects in a near clip collection set to tell the render to only clip these objects with a specified near clip plane could also work.

Obviously a full implementation of vRays clipper feature set would be an excellent addition to Blender/Cycles. But thinking realistically, this is a big ask. I'd be happy with being able to mask a shader based on a picked object as an occusion/clipping mask. Or being able to selectively include/exclude objects from a specific near clip plane.

The key here is to be able to non destructively clip/hide complex objects agnostic of hierarchy. This is especially useful within linked scenes containing complex often configurable data.