3:51 AM, Friday March 25th 2022
Starting with your form intersections, for the most part your work here is looking good, but I did notice a couple spots where some of the intersections were a little oversimplified - mainly where there were curved surfaces involved, but where you ended up drawing the relevant part of the intersection as a straight line. I noted a few such places here but the most obvious is on the cylinder/sphere intersection at the top. Here you have the intersection cut off straight as it goes down the sphere, but this does not take into account the cylinder's own curvature.
Continuing onto your cylinders, your work here is looking solid, so not much else to say here.
And finally, the meat of the lesson - your vehicle constructions. Starting with the form intersection vehicles, I'm pleased to see that you've kept these quite simple. Many students end up taking them too far, pushing well beyond the basic primitives that were requested, but it's an important step to simply focus on how these vehicles, despite all their complexity really are just made up of fairly basic structures. Acknowledging this allows us to structure how we think about them for the more complex constructions with more overall hierarchy.
And it appears that's exactly what you did! Looking through your more complex vehicle constructions, I'm very pleased to see the steps you've taken, and how you've gradually pinned down the positioning of each element, ensuring that they fall where they're meant to. You're making excellent use of subdivision throughout, and it really shines in places like your byplane.
I do have a some thoughts to offer on how things could have been handled differently, to perhaps yield a stronger result - or at least approaches that may have been easier. For example, the galleon you drew here - looking at that structure, my immediate thought is that it's a very similar kind of structure to the computer mouse we tackled in Lesson 6, given that it has a lot of smooth albeit specific curves to it in all three dimensions. It's definitely not just a blocky object with a few cuts - it's shaped in a very specific manner (not unlike a car, but this pushes it even further still).
So for this, I might consider going with the "plan" approach - that is, making orthographic studies as usual, but then using those studies to lay down specific footprints in the construction itself. The main difference I'd employ here is that where for the mouse I'd block out a footprint for the base (where the mouse is flattest), here I'd probably position that top-down footprint closer to the top, where the decks are, as that's the flattest portion of the ship. From there, I'd build out my decks on top of the footprint, and the rest of the ship structure below. It really isn't very different from the computer mouse though, so I would reference that demo further and even experiment with how to use the same approach for a similar construction to this galleon.
Continuing on from there (I'm still scrolling through the gallery from top to bottom), I think my jaw dropped a little as we got into the yamaha motorbike, and then into the ferrari and helicopter. The sheer volume of subdivision, of precision, and of careful observation is really mindblowing here. It's clear that you put in as much time as you needed (and then some), and you've pulled off some excellent constructions here. Not only do they appear visually pleasing, but structurally they're fantastically done.
I think it's fair to say that I'll be marking this lesson - and the course as a whole - as complete. I still remember when you first contacted me to try and do the course without using patreon initially. Admittedly it was kind of a pain to squeeze you in (I didn't do this for anyone else, it definitely would have been too taxing at the time), but I'm glad that you were able to make the shift to Patreon once it became unavoidable. Seeing your progress has been a pleasure, and I'm really thrilled with what you've achieved here.
So! Congratulations for all you've achieved, and I wish you the best of luck with whatever you put these newfound skills towards.