> Are you expecting to be able to literally summon a visual hallucination of these objects?
That's exactly what I get. I can picture an elephant, rotate it around in 3-space, imagine how it looks and how I might draw it from angles that I've never seen an elephant pictured from, etc. I'm no good at drawing living things, but anything geometric I can render on paper pretty much exactly as it appears in my head. It's like CAD but without the CA.
When I was on a field crew installing telephone switching equipment, we'd often get incompletely-engineered jobs, where for various reasons, the rack was supplied with sort of a first-guess of mounting hardware. Sometimes the engineers admitted it, there'd be a note in the plans like "add'l overhead structure tbd by installer". Or sometimes conditions had changed in the time since the job was engineered, due to other activity in the office. Either way, I'd get to sketching and ordering.
(environments like this: https://www.cabletrays.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/image-... )
Typically this meant taking a few measurements, jotting those onto paper, and then drawing out the existing structure and what I planned to add. Then breaking that down into a list of piece-parts, faxing the drawing and the list to the engineer, who would turn it into part numbers for the warehouse, who would arrange for a delivery the next day.
I did it all freehand, or maybe with the aid of a straightedge. This was easy for me, it was exactly like having a bunch of LEGO bricks and picturing how I might put them together. After running it through the fax machine to get engineering signoff, I could hand the drawing to any other installer and they'd know exactly what I had in mind, even if they hadn't initially envisioned it, and I could go do something else while they assembled it. (My upper-body strength was never ideal for the superstructure stuff anyway; if the job involved any wire-wrap terminations that was probably the best place for me.)
The majority of installers in the field could do this, though some were certainly better at it than others. Most would start with a sketch from the perspective of an observer on the ground, even if that wasn't actually the clearest way to depict it, and then add other angles as needed. I knew one who would actually climb into the rack with a clipboard and pencil if he needed to show it from another angle, whereas most of us could freely imagine and project the scene from any desired angle in our heads and just sketch it straight out.
I always thought this was quite normal, and the guy climbing into the rack because he couldn't rotate the view in his head was the anomaly.