Lesson 7: Applying Construction to Vehicles
8:22 PM, Sunday October 24th 2021
This is it! I came here with all the drawings! Thanks a lot for your time as always!
Alrighty, let's get going! Starting with your form intersections, excellent work, for the most part. You've really packed the pages, but didn't skimp on taking your time in figuring out all of these intersections, and for the most part, they've come out quite well. There was maybe one that I caught where it was off - a cone/box towards the upper left, but based on the orientation it could either be like this (where the angle was just a little wrong) or this where it should have been a curve instead of a straight edge. Still, all very well done, and your cylinders in boxes were mostly similarly well done.
Moving onto your vehicle constructions, aside from the tendency to skew your windshields in your car constructions (which I'll touch upon in a sec) you've done very well. You're incredibly meticulous and careful in applying all of the subdivision to break down your constructions and find specific locations for every element. Constructions like this one really show off that patience and care, though it's present in each one.
So the main issue you're running into here are those windshields, and I think it's really just a matter of getting a little lost in the forest. I find it very useful to look at where everything falls relative to the ground - so if we drop the positions of the frontmost and backmost edge of the windshield of this car, we can see that they don't actually line up - not even close. Hence the dramatic skew. Conversely, if we take your fastback mustang and use the same technique in reverse to transpose the positions from one side to the other as shown here, we end up with a windshield that isn't quite as wide across.
This kind of mistake is incredibly easy to make, especially when we rely a little too heavily on copying the reference image. A slight mistake on the orientation of the car relative to the camera/viewer will place that far edge at different locations along the hood, so if you're using elements of the hood as landmarks then you can easily end up with a stretched windshield. Instead, we always have to fall back to the geometry that is present. The things we draw will always need to be informed from keen observation, but accepting that we always need to understand how they apply to the construction present in our own scene. Assuming we're copying the reference closely enough to leverage those landmarks can be quite dangerous.
It's still a technique we do use in some cases - for example, in airplane wings it can be quite useful, but at that point they're going to be so far out that you can't really tell their off one way or the other. Closer in towards the center, it's trickier.
Moving forward, there's another small issue that caught my eye - the turrent on your tank's angle is pretty drastically off, as shown here - or at least, it is if it's meant to be coming straight outwards. If it's tilted upwards, then it's correct, but I don't believe I've seen tanks that articulate in that fashion. I am of course, not an expert in tanks, though.
The last thing is just another similar observation - I think there were some issues that came up with the ellipses making up your locomotive that resulted in some potential distortion. As shown here, my gut tells me that based on the orientation of that front plane, the ellipse itself should be narrower. Yours was much more circular, suggesting it being turned more to face the viewer head-on. Just something to always keep in mind - when we start using really wide ellipses, is it really lining up with the orientation we wish them to have?
Anyway, while these are definitely things to take note of, as a whole your work is still stellar, and you've done a great job of applying the concepts throughout the lesson, and of demonstrating a grasp of 3D space that has developed wonderfully. As such, I am going to go ahead and mark this lesson - and the course with it - as complete.
You are now free to draw your cute anime waifus. Congratulations.
Thanks a lot for the critique! And for the whole course, it really has helped me inmensely!
This is another one of those things that aren't sold through Amazon, so I don't get a commission on it - but it's just too good to leave out. PureRef is a fantastic piece of software that is both Windows and Mac compatible. It's used for collecting reference and compiling them into a moodboard. You can move them around freely, have them automatically arranged, zoom in/out and even scale/flip/rotate images as you please. If needed, you can also add little text notes.
When starting on a project, I'll often open it up and start dragging reference images off the internet onto the board. When I'm done, I'll save out a '.pur' file, which embeds all the images. They can get pretty big, but are way more convenient than hauling around folders full of separate images.
Did I mention you can get it for free? The developer allows you to pay whatever amount you want for it. They recommend $5, but they'll allow you to take it for nothing. Really though, with software this versatile and polished, you really should throw them a few bucks if you pick it up. It's more than worth it.
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