7:46 PM, Tuesday November 14th 2023
Starting in with your form intersections, overall you're doing pretty well here, and your intersections demonstrate a well developed grasp of how these forms relate to one another in 3D space, but there are a few things I wanted to call out:
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For this cylinder/box intersection, the top intersection line is fine (although on either end it could stand to curve a little more dramatically to wrap around the cylinder more convincingly), but the lower intersection doesn't actually make sense. I get what you were going for with this one, which appears to be more a case of the cylinder coming towards the viewer, and piercing through the box in the process, but the way in which that cylinder was drawn has it oriented downwards. So, you wouldn't get a visible second curve, and where it would exit the box would be further towards the back-left corner of the box. Always pay attention to what the forms in question are actually doing, and don't allow your desire to achieve a particular kind of intersection to distract you from that.
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For this intersection, there are a couple things to note. Firstly, depending on which direction we're analyzing the lengthwise surface of the cylinder, it may be curved, or it may be entirely straight, as shown in red on top of your work. This means that the bulk of that intersection is going to be a straight line, cutting along the length of the cylinder, and it would curve only when we hit the underside of the box, which is oriented in a different direction. Secondly, you tackled this intersection with a single line, even though its visible portion covers two planes of the box - meaning that it has to cross the edge between them and dramatically change its trajectory there, resulting in a sharp corner.
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Lastly, when it comes to line weight in this course, don't simply go back over the entire silhouette of the forms. Instead, focus on a more limited use of line weight to emphasize the specific localized overlaps as explained here. I will also have a new video coming out as part of the Lesson 1 boxes section's update that delves into this further - it's currently being edited, and should be out late this month or into the next, so keep an eye out for that if you're at all uncertain about this concept.
Continuing onto your cylinders in boxes, your work here is generally solid, although be sure to draw separate line extensions for each ellipse's minor axis line. There are cases where you only extend one line (like the topmost box, where you appear to have extended the "guide" minor axis line drawn in black - it's rare that you'll nail that alignment with your ellipses so perfectly, so it's important to keep an eye out for even small deviations to avoid plateauing in this area), and in others you appear to have skipped over it entirely.
Moving onto the meat of this lesson, as a whole you've done a really good job. Your form intersection vehicles are kept focused on the problem at hand by simply defining individual primitive volumes and creating a vehicle-like structure. This is intended to help students avoid simply viewing their more complex vehicle constructions as a collection of floating edges that finally come together in the end, and helps them remember that they still need to be thinking in terms of blocking out their major volumes in the same manner, just inside of the confines of a bounding box and whilst applying subdivision/orthographic plans to keep proportions in order.
This concern - that is, thinking in terms of volumes rather than floating edges - is still something that you didn't quite hold to as well as you could have here, and I believe the larger reason for that is that you were somewhat more focused on creating a distinct, easily understandable and visually pleasing end result, which resulted in you using different kinds of pens for the different stages of your construction - a much fainter ballpoint for the construction, and then a fineliner to go back over things and separate them out with a "clean-up pass".
Problem is, that was specifically addressed in the instructions as something to avoid, in the section that allows students to use ballpoint pens. Furthermore, this is an issue that arose in your Lesson 6 work, and I did point it out there as well. While I understand that was a long, long time ago, it does still fall entirely to you to review past feedback, to read the instructions carefully, and to review them as well periodically to ensure you're not missing important points.
While this does not interfere with my ability to see your demonstrated understanding of spatial reasoning, your ability to leverage construction effectively, and so forth, it does impact what you get out of this exercise. By splitting your attention between the actual learning/growth aspect of the exercise, and the desire to create a clean, attractive drawing at the end, you take resources away from the former, which is a considerably more important part of what we're doing here. So, keep that in mind when practicing these exercises for yourself in the future - or when practicing anything you've learned here in this course.
The last thing I wanted to note is that reviewing this section from Lesson 6 in particular would be well worth it. While your use of the orthographic plans does improve a fair bit over the course of the set, they don't quite pin down all of the major landmarks they're meant to. In essence - and this is explained in the section I linked - the purpose of the orthographic plans is to make all of your decisions up-front. By pinning down all the proportional relationships between different elements of the structure, and doing so using subdivisional techniques, we can basically do all the hard thinking two dimensions at a time, and then transfer all of those decisions in exactly the same way by reproducing the steps in three dimensions.
Mind you, that section may not have been there when you were tackling Lesson 6, so think of this as additional information to help you continue applying these concepts effectively going forward, rather than a chastisement of having missed something.
And with that, I'll go ahead and mark this lesson, and the course as a whole, as complete. There were definitely some shortcomings, but at the end of the day they did not meaningfully impact what was a clear demonstration of a solid understanding of 3D space, but be sure to apply them going forward to ensure that you're getting the most out of these kinds of exercises.
Congratulations.