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How can CAD software produce pictorial views of a design?

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Figure 1: Two techniques of representing an object. (A) Perspective drawing, suggesting that the object is cubical. (B) Orthographic top and front views, revealing that the object is not cubical. — drafting Figure 1: *Two techniques of representing an object.* (A) Perspective drawing, suggesting that the object is cubical. (B) Orthographic top and front views, revealing that the object is not cubical.

CAD software produces pictorial views by leveraging the principles of orthographic projection and geometric rotation. While orthographic projection is primarily used for working drawings to provide true descriptions of size and shape, software can manipulate these views to create pictorial representations.12

By rotating an object relative to the reference planes, CAD systems generate various pictorial projections, such as:

Oblique Projection: The software places a principal surface of the object in the plane of the drawing, representing it in its true size and shape, while receding axes are drawn at an arbitrary angle.1
Trimetric Projection: The software projects the object onto a drawing surface such that the three spatial axes appear unequally inclined, with distances along those axes foreshortened by different amounts.3

These methods allow designers to visualize three-dimensional forms without the time-intensive manual construction of traditional perspective drawings. Such representations are particularly valuable for communicating designs to non-specialists, such as investors or marketing teams, who may find complex working drawings difficult to interpret.1