9:41 PM, Tuesday May 30th 2023
Starting with your cylinders around arbitrary axes, for the most part you've done this quite well, but there are a few little cases where you end up forcing your vanishing point to infinity, resulting in no convergence for the side edges, and no shift in the scale between the end closer to the viewer and the end farther away. This isn't something you do all the time - I've definitely had cases where students would carelessly do that for their entire set, which would result in a redo of that section - but it is definitely frequent enough that it's important I call it out.
Forcing vanishing points to infinity in this manner is actually incorrect, and I explain why that is in this section. I'd also recommend going through the very new Lesson 1 boxes videos we released earlier this month, as it goes over the same concepts in greater depth. There's three such new videos:
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and Rotating Forms, Perspective Grids, and Understanding the Concept of Infinity - this last one addresses this issue most directly.
Aside from that, you've done a good job, although I do think that you could stand to put a little more time into applying the ghosting method to your linework - both the straight edges and the ellipses themselves. Right now it seems like you're applying the methodology in part, but that if you gave yourself a few more moments to place the start/end point for the side edges, and to ghost through your ellipses a little more, it'll reflect in better overall control for your linework without harming its confidence.
Unfortunately moving onto the cylinders in boxes, it appears that you may have gone through the instructions a little too quickly, as you seem to have missed a pretty significant part of it. Specifically, you're not applying the line extensions correctly. 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.
Unfortunately you only actually extended the boxes' lines, and entirely skipped extending the three lines associated with each ellipse (the minor axis line and the two contact point lines). The purpose of the exercise is to drop an ellipse into the plane on either end, such that it touches all four edges, and aligns as closely as we can manage to the minor axis line defined by the box's spine. From there, we test how far off those three lines are from converging to the box's own vanishing points for each ellipse, so that we can alter our approach for the subsequent page's boxes, and repeat the process.
In neglecting to do this, you've unfortunately skipped over the heart of this exercise, and so this portion will have to be done again. These things happen some times, but it's important to consider why. Looking at the three issues I've addressed over all, it appears to come down to perhaps a lack of care and time investment keeping you from completing the work as assigned to the best of your current ability - in not quite putting in as much into the use of the ghosting method, as well as in not giving yourself as much time as you need to consider the instructions given to you.
I'm going to assign the cylinders in boxes once again as revisions - and of course, be sure to give yourself more time both in completing the work, and in going through the instructions provided (both in the lessons, and in past rounds of feedback you may have received).
Next Steps:
Please submit 100 additional cylinders in boxes, being sure to apply the line extensions as explained here in the challenge notes.