Change default ClippedVoxelIntensity in vtkVolumeProperty
Default ClippedVoxelIntensity was set to (-1e27), which made clipped volume rendering planes appear too dark and not smooth (probably due to numerical instabilities caused by the extremely large value). If voxel intensity is in (-1e15, 1e15) range then clipped planes look correct, if less than -1e16 or more than 1e16 then they look incorrect.
Use -1e10 as default ClippedVoxelIntensity value to get correct clipped plane appearance by default.
See example rendering results with different ClippedVoxelIntensity values: