It's actually the other way round. From birth, everything that an individual interacts with are ALL 3-D, be definition, and until the advent of solid modeling and 3-D graphical displays, anyone wishing to be an engineer had to learn to both visualize and decipher the world around them in terms of 2-D drawings and orthogonal projections. Due to my introduction to CAD/CAM in 1977, and subsequently working in that industry until I retired four years ago, I was truly one of the pioneers when engineering moved first from 2-D paper drawings to 2-D electronic data to full 3-D solid modeling. During the early days of solid modeling I was one of the people who tested and demonstrated the current state of the art. For example, the image below shows one of the first solid models that I ever created. Note that this was in 1982 and the software, PADL-1, was a language-based product where you had to write lines of code describing each shape that made-up your model (we only had two 'primitive' shapes to work with, a Cylinder and a Block), their size and location, and how they interacted with one another (which items were removed from another, thus forming a void). The picture below is what the result looked like. BTW, after describing the shapes, the three orthogonal and one isometric views were created with a single command, which included the automatic placement of the views and the rendering of the hidden-lines (there was even an option to display dimensions, but it was mostly for hype, and besides, this software was only intended to dangle the bait until we could get enough interest to invest in an actual usable product):
A couple of years later, we were able to model fairly complex assemblies as full solid models and render them as shaded images. The image below was a model that I create which eventually found it's way onto the cover of one of the engineering magazines of the era. This was in 1984, and it was modeled using a software product called UniSolids, for which I was the unofficial Product Manager (there was no official product manager and while I worked in Sales Support, since I was the person who had worked with the software developers to help test the software and perform the first demo's and eventually actual benchmarks, I was the guy shaping the future direction that it was going):
Within 10 years, we were able to produce much more realistic models, such as this one from 1994:
Anyway, back to the point I've been trying to make, and that is that until engineers had access to these 3-D tools, most of them were living in a 2-D environment when it came to how they were communicating with most of the rest of the world. In fact, during an engineering conference I once made this observation: Before the advent of 3-D CAD, if you had asked an engineer to describe, in whatever way that they were most comfortable with, something as simple as a 'brick', the first thing they would do would be to grab a piece of paper and start drawing 2-D orthogonal views AND perhaps a rough 3-D sketch up in the corner. However, if I had given this same task to a non-engineer, it's likely that that person would have simply used their hands to sort of give the impression of the size and shape of the 'brick'. The point I was trying to make in my presentation was that from childhood, people already understanding how the 3-D world worked but engineers had to be trained to view the world in 2-D and to communicate using tools confined to producing 2-D representations of that world and the things in it. I was selling the audience on the idea that 3-D CAD was the 'natural' way to work, leveraging our lifetime experience of interacting with a 3-D world full of solid objects.
So yea, those 'drawing' examples are a bit arcane now, but if nothing else, they could help to 'break ties' as it were.
John R. Baker, P.E. (ret)
EX-Product 'Evangelist'
Irvine, CA
Siemens PLM:
UG/NX Museum:
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