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

Ghosted/Phantom Cutaways

Vertical Oblique Ghosted 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.

By comparison, a Vertical Oblique Sectioned Cutaway

The notorious ghosted or phantom cutaway. Perhaps the most difficult, and most labour intensive form of cutaway, as it involves illustrating every single component of the subject to be illustrated, then carefully layering each part, and yet still trying to clarify the order and placement. This technique is very subjective, and subject to taste...

Other illustration examples:

Please click on the thumbnail images to view page

Standard illustration

Sectioned Cutaway

Exploded Cutaway

Ghosted/Phantom Cutaway

Exploded illustration