Technical and engineering drawing and project visualization - history

How has technical and engineering drawing developed throughout history? Cross section from 2100 BC to the present day.

2100 rpn - The first preserved image of the object in a rectangular projection, taking into account the appropriate scale. The drawing is depicted on the statue of Gudea (1listen)) engineer and ruler

Sumerian city-state of Lagash, located on the territory of modern Iraq.

XNUMXth century BC – Marcus Vitruvius Pollio is considered the father of design drawing, i.e. Vitruvius, Roman architect, constructor

military vehicles during the reigns of Julius Caesar and Octavian Augustus. He created the so-called Vitruvian Man - an image of a naked man inscribed in a circle and a square (2), symbolizing movement (later Leonardo da Vinci distributed his own version of this drawing). He became famous as the author of the treatise On the Architecture of Ten Books, which was written between 20 and 10 BC and was not found until 1415 in the library of the monastery of St. Gallen in Switzerland. Vitruvius describes in detail both the Greek classical orders and their Roman variations. The descriptions were supplemented by appropriate illustrations - the original drawings, however, have not been preserved. In the modern period, many famous authors made illustrations for this work, trying to recreate the lost drawings.

3. One of the drawings by Guido da Vigevano

Średniowiecze – When designing buildings and gardens, geometric principles are used - ad quadratum and ad triangulum, i.e. drawing in terms of a square or triangle. The builders of the cathedral in the process of work create sketches and drawings, but without strict rules and standardization. Book of drawings of siege engines by the court surgeon and inventor Guido da Vigevano, 13353) demonstrates the importance of these early drawings as tools for attracting sponsors and clients wishing to finance construction investments.

1230-1235 – Created an album by Villard de Honnecourt (4). This is a manuscript containing 33 sheets of parchment fastened together, 15–16 cm wide and 23–24 cm high. They are covered on both sides with drawings and marks made with a pen and previously drawn with a lead stick. Drawings about buildings, architectural elements, sculptures, people, animals and devices are accompanied by descriptions.

1335 – Guido da Vigevano is working on the Texaurus Regis Francie, a piece defending the crusade proclaimed by Philip VI. The work contains numerous drawings of war machines and vehicles, including armored chariots, wind carts, and other ingenious siege devices. Although Philip's crusade never took place due to the war with England, da Vigevano's military album predates and anticipates many of the military buildings of Leonardo da Vinci and other sixteenth-century inventors.

4. Page from the album Villara de Onnekura.

1400-1600 - The first technical drawings are in a sense closer to modern ideas, the Renaissance brought many improvements and changes not only in construction techniques, but also in the design and presentation of projects.

XV century – The rediscovery of perspective by the artist Paolo Uccello was used in the technical drawing of the Renaissance. Filippo Brunelleschi began to use linear perspective in his paintings, which for the first time gave him and his followers the opportunity to realistically represent architectural structures and mechanical devices. In addition, drawings from the early XNUMXth century by Mariano di Jacopo, named Taccola, show the use of perspective to depict inventions and machines accurately. Taccola explicitly used drawing rules not as a means of documenting existing structures, but as a design method using visualization on paper. His methods differed from earlier examples of technical drawing by Villard de Honnecourt, Abbé von Landsberg and Guido da Vigevano in their use of perspective, volume and shading. The methods initiated by Taccola have been used and developed by later authors.

Early XNUMXth century – The first traces of the features of modern technical drawings, such as plan views, assembly drawings and detailed sectional drawings, come from Leonardo da Vinci’s sketchbooks made at the very beginning of the XNUMXth century. Leonardo drew inspiration from the work of earlier authors, in particular Francesco di Giorgio Martini, an architect and machine designer. Types of objects in projections are also present in the works of the German master of painting from the time of Leonhard Albrecht Dürer. Many of the techniques used by da Vinci were innovative in terms of modern design principles and technical drawing. For example, he was one of the first to suggest making wooden models of objects as part of the design.

1543 – Beginning of formal training in drawing techniques. The Venetian Academy of Arts del Disegno is founded. painters, sculptors and architects were taught to apply standard design techniques and to reproduce patterns in an image. The academy was also of great importance in the fight against closed systems of training in craft workshops, which usually opposed the use of common norms and standards in design drawing.

XVII century – The technical drawings of the Renaissance were primarily influenced by artistic principles and conventions, not technical ones. This situation began to change in subsequent centuries. Gerard Desargues drew on the work of the earlier researcher Samuel Maralois to develop a system of projective geometry that was used to mathematically represent objects in three dimensions. One of the first theorems of projective geometry, Desargues' theorem, is named after him. In terms of Euclidean geometry, he said that if two triangles lie on a plane in such a way that the three lines defined by the corresponding pairs of their vertices coincide, then the three points of intersection of the corresponding pairs of sides (or their extensions) remain collinear.

1799 - The book "Descriptive Geometry" by the French mathematician of the XVIII century Gaspard Monge (5), prepared on the basis of his previous lectures. Considered the first exposition of descriptive geometry and the formalization of display in technical drawing, this publication dates back to the birth of modern technical drawing. Monge developed a geometric approach to determine the true shape of the intersection planes of the generated shapes. While this approach produces images that are superficially identical to the views that Vitruvius has promoted since ancient times, his technique allows designers to create proportional views from any angle or direction, given a basic set of views. But Monge was more than just a practicing mathematician. He participated in the creation of the entire system of technical and design education, which was largely based on his principles. The development of the drawing profession at that time was facilitated not only by the work of Monge, but also by the industrial revolution in general, the need for the manufacture of spare parts and the introduction of design processes into production. The economy was also important - a set of design drawings in most cases made it unnecessary to build a layout of a working object.

1822 One of the popular methods of technical representation, the axonometric drawing, was formalized by Pastor William Farish of Cambridge in the early 1822 century in his work on the applied sciences. He described a technique for showing objects in three-dimensional space, a kind of parallel projection that maps space onto a plane using a rectangular coordinate system. A feature that distinguishes axonometry from other types of parallel projection is the desire to maintain the real dimensions of the projected objects in at least one selected direction. Some types of axonometry also allow you to keep the dimensions of the corners parallel to the selected plane. Farish often used models to illustrate certain principles in his lectures. To explain the assembly of models, he used the technique of isometric projection - mapping three-dimensional space onto a plane, which is one of the types of parallel projection. Although the general concept of isometrics existed before, it was Farish who is widely credited as the first person to establish the rules of isometric drawing. In 120, in the article “On Isometric Perspective,” he wrote about “the need for accurate technical drawings, free from optical distortions.” This led him to formulate the principles of isometry. Isometric means "equal measures" because the same scale is used for height, width and depth. The essence of an isometric projection is to equalize the angles (XNUMX°) between each pair of axes, so that the perspective reduction of each axis is the same. Since the middle of the nineteenth century, isometry has become a common tool for engineers (6), and shortly thereafter axonometry and isometry were incorporated into architectural research programs in Europe and the United States.

6. Technical drawing in isometric view

80-ies – The latest innovation that brought technical drawings to their present form was the invention of copying them in various ways, from photocopying to photocopying. The first popular reproductive process, introduced in the 80s, was the cyanotype (7). This allowed the distribution of technical drawings down to the level of individual workstations. The workers were trained to read the blueprint and had to strictly adhere to dimensions and tolerances. This, in turn, had a huge impact on the development of mass production, as it reduced the requirements for the level of professionalism and experience of the product performer.

7. Copy of technical drawing

1914 – At the beginning of the 1914th century, colors were widely used in technical drawings. However, by the year 100, this practice had been abandoned by almost XNUMX% in industrialized countries. Colors in technical drawings had different functions—they were used to represent building materials, they were used to distinguish between flows and movements in a system, and simply to decorate images of devices with them.

1963 – Ivan Sutherland, in his Ph.D. thesis at MIT, is developing Sketchpad for design (8). It was the first CAD (Compute Aided Design) program equipped with a graphical interface - if you can call it that, because all it did was create xy diagrams. Organizational innovations applied in Sketchpad marked the beginning of the use of object-oriented programming in modern CAD and CAE (Computer Aided Engineering) systems.

8. Ivan Sutherland introduces Sketchpad

60-s years. – Engineers from major companies such as Boeing, Ford, Citroën and GM are developing new CAD programs. Computer-aided design methods and design visualization are becoming a way to simplify automotive and aviation projects, and the rapid development of new manufacturing technologies, mainly machine tools with numerical control, is not without importance. Due to the significant lack of computing power compared to today's machines, early CAD design required a lot of financial and engineering power.

9. Porter Pierre Bezier with his mathematical formulas

1968 – The invention of XNUMXD CAD/CAM (Computer Aided Manufacturing) methods is credited to French engineer Pierre Bézier.9). To facilitate the design of parts and tools for the automotive industry, he developed the UNISURF system, which later became the working basis for subsequent generations of CAD software.

1971 – ADAM, Automated Drafting and Machining (ADAM) appears. It was a CAD tool developed by Dr. Patrick J. Hanratty, whose Manufacturing and Consulting Services (MCS) company supplies software to large companies such as McDonnell Douglas and Computervision.

80-s years. – Progress in the development of computer tools for solid modeling. In 1982, John Walker founded Autodesk, the main product of which is the world famous and popular 2D AutoCAD program.

1987 – Pro/ENGINEER is released, announcing the increased use of functional modeling techniques and function parameter binding. The manufacturer of this next milestone in design was the American company PTC (Parametric Technology Corporation). Pro/ENGINEER was created for Windows/Windows x64/Unix/Linux/Solaris and Intel/AMD/MIPS/UltraSPARC processors, but over time the manufacturer has gradually limited the number of supported platforms. Since 2011, the only supported platforms are systems from the MS Windows family.

10. Designing robots in a modern CAD program

1994 – Autodesk AutoCAD R13 appears on the market, i.е. the first version of the program of a well-known company working on three-dimensional models (10). It was not the first program designed for 3D modeling. Functions of this type were developed in the early 60s, and in 1969 MAGI released SynthaVision, the first commercially available solid modeling program. In 1989, NURBS, a mathematical representation of 3D models, first appeared on Silicon Graphics workstations. In 1993, CAS Berlin developed an interactive NURBS simulation program for PC called NöRBS.

2012 – Autodesk 360, a cloud-based design and modeling software, enters the market.