Is there a chance Cycle can get this neat feature as in Arnold?
https://docs.arnoldrenderer.com/display/A5NodeRef/clip_geo
At the moment, we have Blender BIM which does something similar but the clip only works with a plane. Clipping an entire geometry would be very convenient compared to more intense boolean operations.
Does no one think this could be a cool feature to have? 
It feels like a render time boolean, but that can already be done with booleans, unless you mean that when you define an object as clip_geo object it will clip everything, but I doubt it since only one layer is being affected in the skull example.
Yes, it’s a render-time boolean.
In the skull example I think we only see one layer being clipped because that was the intent but being a solution that works at the shader level one can clip anything.
Same principle as V-Ray clipper
I think it can be very efficient, especially for animation. From what I remember from my V-Ray days, it was faster than traditional booleans.
I think it’d be awesome, if it somehow worked more fool-proofly than the actual geometry boolean. I’ve found that neither the old boolean or the new exact boolean really work all the time for more complex .stl imports (usually exported from some production cad files). I often would like to do those animated boolean cuts, but have had to resort to other ways of showing a cut section of a product, just because I couldn’t get the animated one to work without spending ungodly amounts of time cleaning up / remodeling the model (usually there’s just no budget to do that sort of thing, have to be efficient…).
I have no idea how a render-time boolean works compared to the geometry one, though, so don’t know if it would even be possible to have a fool-proof render-time boolean
