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Does anyone know appropriate software to redesign the following figure ?

enter image description here

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    There are dozens of applications capable of creating that or something similar. You'll need to perhaps be more specific.
    – Scott
    Jun 28, 2019 at 20:20
  • I would show all related angles that are shown in the above figure. I need to redraw it with same concept. Do you have any recommended application ?
    – Will
    Jun 29, 2019 at 6:36
  • "Appropriate" is very broad. Do you have 3D knowledge? Would you prefer a 2D application? What do you normally use to draw? Can you edit your question to add some more details, otherwise it's a very broad question. Check also How to Ask.
    – Luciano
    Jul 1, 2019 at 7:00

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I wrote at first a comment with the following belittling phrase "Any well armed vector drawing application is ok, for ex Illustrator or Inkscape + numerous others" To prove it to myself I tried to draw the main curves and lines in Illustrator.

I deleted the comment quite soon, because it became clear that the text was bullshit. Altough it was technically true, drawing it for ex. in Illustrator needs plenty of not so trivial geometry knowledge. Coloring, angle markers, arrowheads and texts are quite easy, but the following isn't:

enter image description here

You need the bottom ellipse (magenta) and half ellipses. The blue (=actually a half circle) one is the border of the dome surface. The green ones are crossing curves of different planes and the dome. I found very difficult to draw the half ellipses so that

  • their diagonals meet at the centerpoint O of the bottom ellipse
  • they meet the bottom ellipse apparently perpendicularly
  • they meet in the top point of the dome (=B) which definitely isn't on the blue half circle
  • the green ellipses touch the blue half circle each in their own single touchpoint (A's)
  • the blue half circle meets the bottom ellipse at its main diagonal end points C1, C2

After tinkering a moment in Illustrator I noticed I cannot easily make the green curves to fit exactly without knowing some dimensions, they looked acceptable only in small size and with thick lines. I gave up and went into a 3D program to get everything right.

If you want an exact result without the knowledge of 3D descriptive geometry, you should do the same. Draw at least the basic shapes in 3D (= a sphere + some planes which split the sphere). You can continue in Illustrator, Inkscape or other vector drawing program after exporting the wireframe and opening it.

I drew this in DesignSpark Mechanical (=freeware) saved the wireframe scene as PDF and opened it in Illustrator. There I removed some extra lines and colored the rest. Inkscape fits the job as well because it opens well PDFs this simple.

Colorings and other extra drawings go in Inkscape and Illustrator, the latter has better arrows.

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  • I think i should teach you how to use SSR rotations or Effect -> 3d -> Rotate, if you have hard time drawing this perfectly without a 3d application. There is absolutely nothing here you need a 3d application for, in fact it only slows you down.
    – joojaa
    Jun 29, 2019 at 14:35
  • Illustrator's 3D is 3D except clunky to use. In 2D one can do a construction drawing or he can calculate the needed shearings, scalings and rotations but that needs the knowledge of it. I guess the questioner wants some shortcuts, other than what you have in several occasions called eyeballing and he's not going to learn descriptive geometry. Inkscape's 5pt to ellipse path effect is useful.
    – user82991
    Jun 29, 2019 at 14:56
  • Depends on what you mean by 3d. Illustrator is never 3D. Anyway, you dont need to calculate anything you can just measure them against the geometry you are constructing.
    – joojaa
    Jun 29, 2019 at 15:12
  • That's the construction drawing
    – user82991
    Jun 29, 2019 at 15:13
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    Yeah, so there is some benefit of knowing how to construct the geometry. A dying skill though.
    – joojaa
    Jun 29, 2019 at 15:22
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I think this is approachable in Illustrator, Inkscape or Affinity Designer - for myself at the moment I'd probably go with Affinity Designer for this, assuming the latest release (1.7+) because the recently-updated iso toolset would make some of this work relatively easy to complete.

I'm at a client's worksite ATM, working on a machine which doesn't have the latest version, so it may take a bit for me to post up .gifs or screencaps to illustrate my point.

In short:

You can set up either standard isometry grids or custom, you can interactively match the iso angles to your provided figure if that's preferred, or work with an easier-to-calculate if needed.

Iso Studio / palette out and working: enter image description here

After you've set this up, you can draw your basic shapes, intersecting planes, angles etc straight on - and then Fit To Plane in the new Isometry Studio (palette) with a given plane chosen (top, side, front) and it will match the correct skews to get you there very nicely.

Using Iso Studio's Fit to Plane:

enter image description here

You can also initially draw in that plane; more crucially for this figure, once you've created your hemisphere with transparent fill and dashed linetype for the internal intersecting planes, you can copy the first and paste it, go back into your grid settings and rotate the cube, and Fit to Plane again and you're pretty much home free.

Using Iso Studio's Edit in Plane to draw out shape already in the correct iso plane: enter image description here

You will want to construct the basic annotations and the sunpath with a standard grid or no snapping, but all-in-all, this workflow would make light work of this kind of sunpath / insolation incident angle diagram.

Still embedded at the client's site - I did a quick jump to a development laptop which does have the latest Affinity Designer, but is unfortunately a bit glitchy on the Screen2GIF version - so here's just the last most critical part of what I was trying to explain about fitting elements to the projected grid and then re-orienting the iso grid and fitting other elements as a way to determine appropriate transforms.

enter image description here enter image description here

Hope this helps.

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Illustrator can do some. Live trace functioonality is called. The finesse it's up to you, tho

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    Can you edit to expand what you meant? As it is your answer is quite short / generic, check How to Answer. Also the question is about redesigning the figure, not just tracing over it.
    – Luciano
    Jul 1, 2019 at 7:09

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