Cutaway Drawing - Overview

Overview

According to Diepstraten et al. (2003) "the purpose of a cutaway drawing is to allow the viewer to have a look into an otherwise solid opaque object. Instead of letting the inner object shine through the surrounding surface, parts of outside object are simply removed. This produces a visual appearance as if someone had cutout a piece of the object or sliced it into parts. Cutaway illustrations avoid ambiguities with respect to spatial ordering, provide a sharp contrast between foreground and background objects, and facilitate a good understanding of spatial ordering".

Though cutaway drawing are not dimensioned manufacturing blueprints, they are meticulously drawn by a handful of devoted artists who either had access to manufacturing details or deduced them by observing the visible evidence of the hidden skeleton (e.g. rivet lines, etc.). The goal of this drawings in studies can be to identify common design patterns for particular vehicle classes. Thus, the accuracy of most of these drawings, while not 100 percent, is certainly high enough for this purpose.

The technique is used extensively in computer-aided design, see first image. It has also been incorporated into the user interface of some video games. In The Sims, for instance, users can select through a control panel whether to view the house they are building with no walls, cutaway walls, or full walls.