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250 Cylinder Challenge

10:40 AM, Friday August 6th 2021

250 cylinders challenge - Album on Imgur

Direct Link: https://i.imgur.com/dMePNGj.jpg

Post with 93 views. 250 cylinders challenge

This took just over two months from start to finish. I feel like I say it after every piece of drawabox work, but this felt like the hardest one so far ^^; in particular, the boxed cylinders section pushed me to the edge quite a lot when I started them. I think I started to get the hang of them towards the end... a couple of things I learned/realised:

  • When a box has long sets of converging lines, it makes sense for that vanishing point to be further away because the sides appear closer to us. The opposite applies for short sets of lines. Utilising this principle made creating decent cylinders much easier. Particularly as having a close vanishing point on one/two sides makes the front/back sides of the cylinder much clearer in terms of size.

  • It's very very difficult to construct a cylinder whose sides converge towards the right vanishing point AND have the minor axes converging towards the true minor axis. I found that concentrating on getting the sides right (by making sure the cylinder ellipses intersected the sides of the faces at the right angles) was much more important for getting a good-looking cylinder. When I tried concentrating on getting the minor axes right, which was often impossible anyway because of how the box turned out, the results were not good.

The first 150 cylinders seems such a long time ago now. At the time I tried to use plenty of different angles and sizes, though it could never prepare me for what's to come.

Thanks in advance for the feedback!

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2 users agree
6:25 PM, Monday August 9th 2021

Hi Cynsh! Im going to go over your submission.

Starting out by your cylinders around an arbitrary axis, it looks like you are doing a good job aligning your ellipses to their minor axis, although your ellipses started a little wobbly at the beginning, you made up for it later! As always, there is still some things that I want to talk about.

First off, the convergence of a cylinder (and other forms) is represented on two ways. its reflected on the change of scale between the two ellipses, where the closer one is bigger than the further one, its always visible on the shift of degrees of the ellipses, where the further ellipse always has a wider degree than the closer one. This two "shifts" help the viewer understand how a cylinder is converging, though they need to work together. Here I picked a cylinder where these two "shifts" are communicating two different foreshortenings- On one case, the sizes of of this two ellipses are pretty similar, while the back one is smaller, its not a drastic change, this tells the viewer that the convergence is shallow. However, when seeing the change in degrees between this ellipses, its way more drastic, where the closer one is really narrow, and the back one really wide, this is communicating the viewer that there is a lot of convergence happening on the ellipse. In this cases what it ends up happening is that the illusion of depth gets broken. To be honest, you are doing an overall job on this area, though I wanted to pick one of the cases where it didnt work out to explain this, so you can apply it more consciously!

Another thing that called my attention is that as you move forward with the challenge, some of your cylinders started looking a not so much as 3d representations of circles, but more like tappered circles. Take for example this cylinder you have drawn, see how it looks more like a deformated cylinder, that is wider on one direction than the other. The thing to remember here is that ellipses are representations of perfect circles in 3d space, while we are never going to be able to create an ellipse that perfectly represents a circle because we are not machines, we need to always strive for it. This happened quite a lot on your later cylinders around arbitrary axis and is also we have been dealing on your sausages where you are sometimes making ellipses flatter than what they should. Dont worry too much about it, the key thing to remember is what I have been saying about ellipses representing perfect circles in 3d.

Moving on to your cylinders in boxes, it seems like the issue we have just talked about, translated a little into this sections of the challenge. The aim of this part are not the ellipses, the aim here is for you to develop your intuition when creating boxes whit more square proportions so they better fit circles. The issue that I think it happened here is that you are not fully understanding that these ellipses you have been drawing are supposed to be circles in 3d, and when you where drawing your boxes you wouldnt always aim to create a box with at least a pair of faces that are proportionally square so you when you fit your ellipses in there they would create a better cylinder.

As to take an example, check this one, I think we can both agree that thats not a cylinder, but more of a tappered one. Now, I want to clarify that I know that this is not an easy exercise, I also have a hard time creating proportionally correct boxes that can fit ellipses, but the reason that I wanted to point this out is that it seems like the issue wasnt your ability to create this kind of boxes, since you showed in quite a lot of cases that you are able to (221 and 225 are an example of some well done), but the issue was this missunderstanding that we have been talking about.

All this said, I think you did pretty good on this challenge, though I want to ask for some revisions, just to make sure that you are able to get past this deformed cylinders issue.

Next Steps:

Im going to ask for 10 cylinders around arbitrary minor axis, I want you to focus on the shifts we have talked about, and especially on not making your ellipses wider on one direction, this is more like a intuitive thing, so try to judge them as objectively as you can, and if you cant dont worry since thats why Im here for!

I will be also asking for just a page of cylinders in boxes (do 4 or 3, just try to give them space), where I want your focus to be mostly on constructing the box- Try meet the criteria that we have been talking about: this is, at least 1 pair of faces have to be proportionally close to a square, so when you draw the ellipses, they come as circles in 3d.

Good luck and please dont hold back on any questions!

When finished, reply to this critique with your revisions.
3:07 PM, Friday August 13th 2021

https://imgur.com/a/OAwTsfR

3:35 PM, Friday August 13th 2021

Hi Cynsh! I think you made some improvements on the areas I asked revisions for, though as always there are a couple of things that i want to draw attention to.

First, on your cylinders around arbitrary axis, it seems like you made some mistakes relating how foreshortening manifests itself on cylinders, on this first page, Elodin helped me out and marked how this ellipse degree should be, by drawing a box around it. Remember to always balance the two shifts (scale and degree) that happen on the ellipses. Here are some correction on the same topic, but on your second page.

Now, I advise you go back and give a couple of reads all what I explained about foreshortening in cylinders, since its really important for you moving forward.

Moving on to your boxes with cylinders, I think that you are doing a good job on constructing boxes that have at least one pair of faces proportionally square. However, I really found it weid when I saw your third one, it seems like you choose the most awkward faces to draw your ellipses, and so it didnt come out as a cylinder at all. Here I just drew over that one box and added the ellipses on other planes and it worked much better. Remember that drawing proportionally square boxes its a matter of practice and observation, though in this case is also taking into account that we need those boxes to fit cylinders, so we have to choose the most square planes to put our ellipse there.

I think that you showed some improvement on this revision so Im going to mark this challenge as completed! keep up the good work.

Next Steps:

Feel free to move on to lesson 6.

This community member feels the lesson should be marked as complete, and 2 others agree. The student has earned their completion badge for this lesson and should feel confident in moving onto the next lesson.
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