Drawings still rule despite 3D’s overwhelming advantages.
They stab it with their steely knives
But they just can’t kill the beast.
—-Eagles, Hotel California, 1977
3D may have won the war against 2D, but pockets of resistance continue to fight on. It was supposed to have been a quick war. With all the advantages the forces of 3D had on their side, surely 2D would surrender quickly.
I started teaching 3D CAD in 1989 after realizing the enormous potential of 3D. I evaluated and implemented enterprise CAD programs from McDonnell Douglas (which have evolved into NX) and Applicon Bravo (now extinct) in my first full-time position as an engineer. Both programs ran on expensive workstations connected to DEC’s VAX minicomputers. I taught design, engineering fundamentals and CAD at a community college using AutoCAD, a program that was then, as now, known primarily for its 2D. I wrung as much 3D out of AutoCAD as possible, modeling in 3D wireframe and solid modeling. AutoCAD had licensed ACIS and was able to do CSG (constructive solid geometry) and through a combination of primitive shapes, hundreds of blocky, useless parts were born. I was betting on 3D as the imminent future. I hedged my bet by showing how to make front, top and right views. With view creation being push-button easy, I had to devote only a few classes to 2D.
But 2D still hangs in there… literally. I have just hung D-size drawings to the wall for the contractors remodeling my house. They’re familiar with drawings. With CAD, not so much. With 3D, forget about. A year ago when I started planning the project, I dreamt of seeing the remodeled space in 3D, fully rendered and in VR. This was a wake-up call.
Rumors of my death have been greatly exaggerated.
—-Mark Twain, acting the part of 2D
A rush to cut
I have no doubt that the ease with which a pencil can be put to paper to produce drawings is responsible for a perceived speed advantage. A colleague of mine and a contemporary from the drafting table era dismisses CAD, and 3D CAD in particular, continually goads me with “If CAD is so great, how come I can sketch a part on a napkin and take it to the shop before you can start your CAD program?”
Any argument to the contrary falls on deaf ears. I know 2D’s speed to be a false promise. Many a time have I rushed into the shop with such a sketch only to cut parts and regret I haven’t drawn to scale, cut to the wrong dimension, discover detail not detailed or run out of material or parts. I totally understand the hurry to get started, to start cutting.
A little history
2D champions may argue that it a natural form of documentation since we have been drawing in 2D as long as we have been on Earth. They draw support from the cave painting of a pig hunt in the caves on the Indonesian Island of Sulawesi said to be over 50,000 years old. However, 3D predates cave paintings by eras. Archaeologists found a 3D likeness of a person that is older than cave paintings by hundreds of thousands of years. That was the Tan Tan statue, which broke the $100 million barrier for statues of any age in a 2014 auction. It is estimated to be 300,000 to 500,000 years old.
The tail wags the dog
The way to describe an object so it can be manufactured, conveyed to others, or recorded for posterity, is influenced in no small part by the medium at hand. For as old as civilization, the medium has been 2D, such as the wall of caves, stone tablets, papyrus, parchment, scrolls … Maps show the Earth as flat. So pervasive became 2D over millennia that it may have distorted our reality. How else to explain those who saw the Earth as flat long after it was proved otherwise? The world we show as flat becomes the flat world we live in. Ergo, our walls, buildings, roofs … all are flat.
3D is more natural, but it doesn’t matter
Bam! That’s the gavel coming down. 3D is the natural way of describing an object. But no judgment will convince everyone to put down their pencils or switch their CAD to 3D mode.
Millions of 2D practitioners make 2D projections of 3D objects. For them, 2D is not an abstraction of reality but the simplest, most elegant and most efficient way to describe an object. With its set of standard views, it is systematic and complete.
Orthographic projection may not come naturally to all, but what does not come naturally can be taught. Those who can’t get the picture are taught to create the conventional views (front, top and right views for a mechanical part or the plans and elevations of a building) using construction lines. It’s a science, not an art.
Once learned, often painstakingly, 2D drawing and drafting can become second nature, and like every lesson learned after much time and effort, it becomes worthy of retaining and repeating, not casually abandoned. Abandoning 2D would be tantamount to admitting time and effort were wasted learning an unnecessary skill.
Or is it the Stockholm Syndrome, us in love with a master who was once cruel to us, but one we now depend on and is our only hope of survival?
2D will, no doubt, continue while its practitioners still have breath in their bodies and perhaps a generation afterward. There’s just so much of it in the system. And so we are bound to ask for a while longer, “Why will 2D CAD not go away?”
