©1998-2012 Griff Wason | All rights reserved. All trademarks and trade names acknowledged.

Front view of the GWai 50mm lens

These illustrations show the most realistic views of the subject camera lens with the added bonus of a surprise mouse-over cutaway.

Cutaway illustrations / drawings

The purpose of a cutaway drawing is to allow the viewer to see into an otherwise solid or near opaque object. Instead of letting the inner object shine through the outer surface, parts of the outside 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 can avoid ambiguities with respect to actual spatial ordering, can provide a sharp contrast between foreground and background objects, and facilitate a good understanding of spatial ordering.

Though cutaway drawing are not generally dimensioned manufacturing schematics, they are normally completed with access to an actual example of the subject, or by access to the original manufacturers schematics, or deduced by observing the visible evidence of the underlying structure. The goal of these drawings 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.

A little history

The cutaway view and the exploded view were minor graphic inventions of the Renaissance that also clarified pictorial representation.

The term "Cutaway drawing" was already in use during the 19th century but, became popular especially in the 1930’s.

Technique

The location and shape to cut the outside object depends on many different factors, for example the sizes and shapes of the inside and outside objects,

the semantics of the objects, personal taste, etc.

These factors can seldom be formalized in an simple algorithm, but the properties of a cutaway can generally be distinguished into two classes:

Cutout: illustrations were the cutaway is restricted to very simple and regularly shaped of often only a small number of planar slices into the outside object.

Breakaway: a cutaway realized by a single hole in the outside object.

Please move your mouse over the Camera Lens opposite to view the sectioned cutaway

Please move your mouse over the Camera Lens opposite to view the sectioned cutaway

Other illustration examples:

Standard illustration

Sectioned Cutaway

Exploded Cutaway

Ghosted/Phantom Cutaway

Exploded illustration

Please click on the thumbnail images to view page

Partially disassembled view of the GWai 50mm lens

Sectioned Cutaway - Camera Lens

As I have mentioned elsewhere, the photographic camera lens is externally a deceptively simple device.

As you can see from my illustration opposite, internally even a fairly simple lens is a very complex and beautifully evolved optical instrument.