isometric drawing

isometric drawing, method of graphic representation of three-dimensional objects, used by engineers, technical illustrators, and, occasionally, architects. The technique is intended to combine the illusion of depth, as in a perspective rendering, with the undistorted presentation of the object’s principal dimensions—that is, those parallel to a chosen set of three mutually perpendicular coordinate axes.

The isometric is one class of orthographic projections. (In making an orthographic projection, any point in the object is mapped onto the drawing by dropping a perpendicular from that point to the plane of the drawing.) An isometric projection results if the plane is oriented so that it makes equal angles (hence “isometric,” or “equal measure”) with the three principal planes of the object. Thus, in an isometric drawing of a cube, the three visible faces appear as equilateral parallelograms; that is, while all of the parallel edges of the cube are projected as parallel lines, the horizontal edges are drawn at an angle (usually 30°) from the normal horizontal axes, and the vertical edges, which are parallel to the principal axes, appear in their true proportions.