Hello Koolestani,

I'm happy to hear that the feedback helped you to grasp some of the concepts involved with these constructional exercises, and will do my best to address your remaining concerns and questions.

I think, I'm still not quite where the lesson wants me to be.

The alterations you made to your own constructions are showing a pretty good understanding of the points discussed in my feedback, and we'll continue to practice these techniques into the next lesson using animals as our subject matter, so you'll get plenty of opportunity to apply them as you move forward.

I mostly just ended up drawing ellipses to indicate the contact of the additional mass that lays over the basic sausage form for all the legs. My brain just sees elliptical contours as the boundary of the connective surface between the sausage form and the form added above it. Is that correct?"

The design of how the additional mass makes contact with the underlying structures will vary on a case by case basis. I try and push students to think about their masses first as they exist on their own, in the void, as a ball of soft meat. Here they have no complexity, being made up only of outward curves with no corners to their silhouettes. Once they press up against an existing structure however, they start developing complexity, with inward curves to wrap around those existing forms as shown here. This essentially means that we need to always make sure that we understand the nature of both the additional mass, and all the forms it's pressing up against. This diagram shows a more exaggerated version of what you're describing with the masses on your legs, and how to wrap the additional mass around the sausage form to give it a firmer grip. This is something Uncomfortable goes over a bit more in the next lesson.

Also I was surprised to see how little space there was on the page to add little clumps of mass over the legs of some of these creatures even when I dedicated the whole page to just one creature. Is that normal?

Yes, that is pretty normal. In general, animal legs are often a bit thicker than insect legs, so this should be less of a problem as you move forward with the next lesson.

I can see that this is basically an exercise of geometric intersections.

So when the appendage in the claw of the scorpion intersects with the base form of the claw which is a sphere the boundary of the intersection follows the curvature of the sphere (wraps around its surface).

Yes, that is the right way to think about it.

On the page with two beetles drawn on it, the beetle on the top, label A, here I visualize the form with the antennae attaches to its head which is a sphere and the result is a boundary that looks like its wearing a VR headseat. This is what seemed right to me. What do you think about it?

It is better for sure. You've changed the addition to the head from a partial shape to a complete form. The more complicated a form is, the more difficult is is for the viewer to understand how the form is supposed to exist in 3D space. So this worked better on your june bug, where the addition was simpler. For the complex extension to the head of the beetle at the top of this page I think it would work better to break it into more steps, adding several forms, while keeping each individual form a bit simpler and more limited in scope. You'll see an example of this in the ant head demo where uncomfortable attaches a simple boxy form to the front of the head, then the basic form of each mandible, and finally each individual spike, one at a time. Everything is built up, starting from the big, simpler masses, gradually getting smaller and more complex.

Likewise, in the ten lined june bug, label A, I see the intersection of the elongated form with its spherical head like that of a ducks bill with it face.

Yes, this works.

In the crab with tons of annotation, I think I have got the right idea of how the lumps of mass connect to the spherical base form of its claws, I am still not sure about what I could have done better with the connective lump of mass hatched and labelled B, I don't see any hidden line that I could have added to improve upon the illusion of it wrapping around in 3D space and connecting the spheres on either sides of it.

Use the sausage method for your limbs and you won't have this problem. The definition of a sausage form introduced here is two spheres of equal size connected by a bendy tube of consistent width, which I think is what you were trying to go for where you've marked E.

Label C and D, I think they now look like lumps that wrap around their base form of an ellipsoid.

Yeah, that's a tricky one. If we used the idea you brought up earlier with the scorpion claws, treating them like geometric intersections, we could use boxier forms for the shell of the crab, and then think about how those boxy forms would intersect with the underlying ball-like form of the body. You're approach here isn't wrong, but that's how I'd think about tackling the shell so it feels structural, rather than, as you said, lumpy.

On the green metallic beetle, labels A, B and E, again I could only imagine the boundaries of the intersection of forms added over the base form as elliptical contours. With E being just a tiny sliver / slice of a larger sphere.

I'm not sure these specific alterations were necessary, as you had already drawn complete forms for these pieces, wrapping them around your underlying ball forms. Here is what I mean for A and B.

C and D also seemed to sit on the base form in a way that would cause the geometric intersection to look like an ellipse.

These look good.

I think that should answer your various questions, let me know if I missed any.

Your comments and alterations show that you're on the right track. Most of your alterations don't seem to be following the specifics of the sausage method of leg construction. I appreciate that this isn't something you can really fix after you've already drawn the constructions. Just be sure to start with simple sausage forms, then a contour line for the intersection at each joint, then your additional forms. The method is quite specific, here is a quick little example in the context of one of your beetle legs.

Keep up the good work.