Hi,
Please find my submission for the 250 cylinders challenge. I did 150 regular ones and 100 inside a box. I tried to vary sizes and foreshortening. It's honestly a tough one and I didn't want to rush it. I tried to respect the 50% rule.
It comes in 2 parts since Imgur only allows 50 pix per upload. Here is the link for part 2. I'm happy with part of it, less so with others.
Starting with your cylinders around arbitrary minor axes, your work here is fairly well done. Your ellipses are drawn confidently, your side edges are very straight and purposefully executed, and you're doing a great job of checking the alignment of your minor axes, picking up both significant and minor discrepancies, which is important to ensure that you do not plateau in improving in that area.
There is one issue, although it's minor - the assignment asked for students to vary their rates of foreshortening, and while you did a little here and there, it wasn't very much, with most of the cylinders being drawn with fairly dramatic foreshortening. This isn't as bad as most students who make the same mistake though - many of them draw all their cylinders with no foreshortening/convergence at all, which is actually wrong, as this would only occur if it were running perpendicular to the viewer's angle of sight, not slanting towards or away from them at all (which isn't something that is likely to happen, given that we're rotating these randomly in this exercise). Since you went more with dramatic foreshortening, that's less of a problem.
The reason we ask for more variety however is so we can look at the way in which the students' ellipses change from end to the other - both in their overall scale (with the farther end being smaller) and in their degree (with the farther end being wider). Both of these are manifestations of foreshortening, and they tell us whether the length of the form on the page is how long the cylinder actually is in 3D space, or if there's more of it hidden in the "unseen" dimension of depth - and thus, they have to operate in tandem, with that far ellipse getting wider roughly as quickly as it gets smaller. For the most part, you do appear to be demonstrating an awareness of this, whether conscious or unconscious.
Moving onto your cylinders in boxes, unfortunately you didn't do this one correctly - but don't worry, I'm not going to go all "SO NOW GET OUT OF MY CLASS" on you, because I can at least see that you made an effort. I say this because the issue is not that you forgot to do something, but that you misunderstood the instructions and did something else instead. Or at least, that's my interpretation based on what I'm seeing - so if I'm wrong, best not to tell me.
This exercise is really all about helping develop students' understanding of how to construct boxes which feature two opposite faces which are proportionally square, regardless of how the form is oriented in space. We do this not by memorizing every possible configuration, but rather by continuing to develop your subconscious understanding of space through repetition, and through analysis (by way of the line extensions).
Where the box challenge's line extensions helped to develop a stronger sense of how to achieve more consistent convergences in our lines, here we add three more lines for each ellipse: the minor axis, and the two contact point lines. In checking how far off these are from converging towards the box's own vanishing points, we can see how far off we were from having the ellipse represent a circle in 3D space, and in turn how far off we were from having the plane that encloses it from representing a square.
So, what did you do wrong? Well, you drew the boxes fine. You drew the cylinder fine. But unfortunately, you applied your line extensions incorrectly. If you look at the diagram from the website - which admittedly is visually confusing, as this is something of a confusing concept - you'll see that there are many lines extended in each direction. Each set (red, green, blue) has the box's own extensions, but for the cylinder's part:
The red has both ellipses' minor axes drawn separately, going down the length of the cylinder (2 lines)
The blue has the lines running through one pair of contact points for each ellipse, shooting off to one side (2 lines)
The green has the lines running through the other pair of contact points for each ellipse, shooting off to the other side (2 lines)
As you can see, each ellipse contributes 1 line each in each axis. But the way you drew them, you had all the additional lines going down the length of the cylinder (the red axis), and for the contact points you drew lines that passed from the same contact point of one ellipse, through the other. If you look closer at the diagram, that is not what is depicted.
So, unfortunately the analysis portion of this exercise was not done correctly, and we will have to address that with some revisions, which you'll find below. Given that I've called this out, I expect that you won't make this mistake in any of the new attempts.
Next Steps:
Please submit an additional 25 cylinders in boxes. If these are successful, then you'll be able to continue working on them in your own warmups - but I want to make sure that you do understand how to perform the analysis.
Hi Uncomfortable,
Thanks for the feedback and apologies for not reading the instructions thoroughly. I get it, though.
Here is what I did. Cube 1: I used a red pen to check everything then realized it's hella confusing. Cubes 2 and 3 I switched to different colours for different vanishing points, still not good. From cube 5 I used a black pen for the cube's edges extensions as well as the cylinder's sides. I used an orange marker for the ellipses real minor axeses, a green pen for one set of points on the ellipse and blue pen for the other set.
For the green and blue lines, I tried to keep it honest and used whatever point where the ellipse and cube edge meet. Hence some of the lines sometimes shooting off in awkward directions rahter than towar the VP. Same for the orange minor axis, like cubes 8 and 20, it goes nowhere in the direction of the VP. I mean, some of my ellipses look like burger buns. I feel toward the end I sort of maybe got slightly better ish (cube 19). Anyway, cool exercise for practicing ellipses !
Let me know !
Link:
Well done! This time you've followed the instructions for the line extension/analysis properly, and you've demonstrated your understanding of how to approach it. I did notice that with these boxes, you did consistently put the vanishing points close to the form (and you marked them on the page, which you should avoid doing in the future because it basically forces you to lean into really dramatic foreshortening) - be sure to play with both dramatic and shallower foreshortening when doing this exercise as part of your future warmups.
So! I'll go ahead and mark this challenge as complete.
Next Steps:
Move onto lesson 6.
While I have a massive library of non-instructional art books I've collected over the years, there's only a handful that are actually important to me. This is one of them - so much so that I jammed my copy into my overstuffed backpack when flying back from my parents' house just so I could have it at my apartment. My back's been sore for a week.
The reason I hold this book in such high esteem is because of how it puts the relatively new field of game art into perspective, showing how concept art really just started off as crude sketches intended to communicate ideas to storytellers, designers and 3D modelers. How all of this focus on beautiful illustrations is really secondary to the core of a concept artist's job. A real eye-opener.
This website uses cookies. You can read more about what we do with them, read our privacy policy.
