250 Box Challenge
1:50 AM, Saturday March 9th 2024
This homework assignment was done before the update.
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6:29 PM, Tuesday March 12th 2024
Sorry for the wait in receiving your feedback - the TA who is usually assigned to the box challenge work was going to tackle it yesterday, but they realized that there was a fairly significant instruction that you missed when doing the work that unfortunately undermined the effectiveness of the exercise. Usually in cases like this I take them on myself, so I can best judge what next steps we should recommend to address the concern.
The issue is that you appear to have drawn your boxes largely with the intent of keeping all of your edges parallel on the page, effectively trying to force all 3 vanishing points to infinity. As explained here in Lesson 1, this sort of "0 point perspective" does not exist. We also mentioned it in the reminders section of the original instructions, which was highlighted in red - since the material has been updated, I can't point to it directly, but it was similar to what's shared here in the updated material, specifically the top point.
Unfortunately it seems that you missed this, and as a result, you appear to have been aiming for a different goal than what the challenge prescribed. While this kind of issue doesn't come up often, you're far from the first person to do so, and it's actually one of the major reasons we overhauled the way the box challenge was prescribed so heavily to specifically avoid it as much as possible.
Normally this issue, when it does appear, goes hand-in-hand with an incorrect application of the line extensions (having them extend in the wrong direction), and while you did this on occasion, it was not enough to be statistically relevant. Because of this, while my initial intent was to assign a full redo, something I really, really hate to do, I think you've given me an excuse to spare you, at least to a degree.
Instead of having you redo the entirety of the challenge and draw a full 250 boxes, I am going to ask you to do 100 - more specifically, I want you to complete the "First Fifty" and the "Next Fifty" portions of the updated instructions. In other words, you'll be drawing 50 boxes with concrete vanishing points on the page, forcing you to lean into much more rapid convergence, and then another 50 with vanishing points further away, so we can ensure that you understand the mechanics of having your convergences be more gradual without eliminating them entirely.
This is still a lot of work, and I expect that it will still be very frustrating news to receive. Whether you followed the instructions correctly or not, you did complete a considerable amount of work, and hearing that you have to go back into the crucible, even if it's for a more limited set than it could be, is undoubtedly going to sting.
I recommend you give yourself some time to absorb that information, and to process that frustration, before tackling the revisions. Things like this- well, they really suck, but for every student who's made this blunder before and decided to jump back in, I've noticed a far greater amount of care in following their instructions going forward, taking an unpleasant mistake and turning it into a moment to improve the strategies with which we tackle courses and exercises in the future.
When you've completed your revisions, you can submit them as a reply to my critique, and I will provide you with the remainder of your feedback.
Next Steps:
Go through all of the updated instructional material for the box challenge, then complete the "First Fifty" and "Next Fifty" portions, totaling to 100 additional boxes.
4:57 PM, Monday April 15th 2024
7:33 PM, Monday April 15th 2024
Starting with the first 50 of your revisions, you've handled these quite well. For the most part you're focusing on how your lines are meant to converge - there are a few small hiccups, like in number 2 where you've got one of your blue edges going way off from its intended vanishing point (suggesting you lost focus), but that being early in the set is much, much less of a concern.
When you move onto the second half of the set, one impression I'm getting is that you may be intending to keep your sets of edges parallel on the page itself (rather than having them converge towards a far off point, which would still result in some convergence). As you progress through the set, I feel that your intent here shifts more towards pushing and exaggerating the convergence a little more, which is more in line with the instructions (which for this particular issue you can review here in these reminders, specifically the first bullet point).
I'm going to mark this challenge as complete, but do be sure to keep in mind that our vanishing points are only ever forced to infinity (resulting in fully parallel lines on the page) when the set of edges runs perpendicularly to the viewer's angle of sight, which given the random rotation of our boxes here is not something you can rely on for this challenge.
Next Steps:
Move onto Lesson 2.
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