[Blindmath] Understanding how to draw 3D objects

[Michael Whapples]

Hello,
Its with a bit of dread of what I may start, but how might one go about understanding how to draw something in 3D when you cannot see?

This question arises from me reading about the PGF/TikZ stuff for LaTeX on the LaTeX wikibook (http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/LaTeX/PGF/TikZ ). On that page the last example is meant to be a torus and reading the example code I think I can understand what would be shown on the page and then relate this to what angle one is meant to be viewing the torus from (I believe its as if the torus were laid down on the table and one looked from the side, slightly from above as well). I think it probably is helping me to understand this as I have seen a little in the past and so have an idea what a 3D object looks like visually. Where I do struggle is in trying to think how I would approach drawing such objects? I have to be honest, I probably would never have thought of drawing a torus using the lines given in the example (I am not actually sure what lines I would have specified).

Does anyone have any tips on working out how to specify 3D objects into lines one needs to draw when drawing it? Might it be a useful thing to do, get out a pen and try drawing it by hand seeing what lines I am drawing with the pen.

Michael Whapples