Lesson 7: Applying Construction to Vehicles
7:14 AM, Monday August 26th 2024
Finally, I finish the lesson 7.
Very challenging!
Jumping in with your form intersections, by and large these are looking good and demonstrating a solid grasp of the relationships between these forms as they exist in 3D space. The main thing I wanted to call out for you to keep in mind going forward, is to ensure you're always thinking about just how dramatic or shallow a curving intersection should be. So for example towards the upper left, where you've got a cylinder spearing through a sphere, this results in two distinct curves. For the one to the right side (where the cylinder is coming out of the sphere), the curvature is too shallow to really wrap along the surface of the cylinder. Always remember that intersection lines run along the surface of both forms simultaneously, and so we want to ensure that we consider both curvatures together (which is far easier said than done).
The other point I wanted to call out is just a reminder to go through this section on hatching as it pertains to this exercise. You adhere to them in principle (in that you always apply hatching lines in ways that reinforce rather than contradict the surface they're applied to), but I did want to note that you used way more hatching than what those instructions would consider ideal. Remembering that everything we work with is first and foremost a tool (we don't really worry about decoration in this course), remember that hatching, like any tool, serves a purpose - and so it helps to always be aware of what that purpose is, and whether that purpose has been achieved already. So in the sense of, say, hatching on a box, it's meant to help clarify to the viewer (since we're drawing through our boxes), which faces are pointed towards the viewer, and which are pointed away from the viewer. Once you add hatching to one face, this becomes entirely clear, so there isn't really any benefit (outside of decorative) to adding hatching to other faces of the same box.
Continuing onto the cylinders in boxes, unfortunately it does not seem you applied the line extensions correctly here. I'm seeing all 12 of the boxes' edges being extended, and then one line for each ellipse marking their minor axes (although these should be extended farther so they can be compared to the boxes' line extensions). What I'm not seeing at all are the contact point lines. Please be sure to review the instructions for this and ensure that if you're revisiting an exercise you haven't done as part of your warmups for some time, that you're not working off memory. Human memory is notoriously faulty, so going back and checking things is important.
Moving onto your form intersection vehicles, while you definitely went farther with these than was asked (where they're assigned under the homework section, it says not to use subdivision, just stick to primitive forms, etc.) but at its core you still stuck to what was most important about this aspect of the assignment. Since our more detailed demonstrations end up looking a lot like we're just laying down a lot of different lines, then stitching them together into an object in the last step, it's easy for students to get the impression that our approach to construction has changed fundamentally. By working with the more standard inside-out approach as we do here, focusing on adding individual volumes to the structure and then refining/building upon them, it helps to push away from that tendency. In a manner of speaking, it reminds us that we're still whittling down a block of wood, rather than building up from toothpicks.
Finally, looking at your detailed vehicle constructions, as a whole these are well done. There are certainly mistakes - for example, with number 4 your orthographic plan has the wheels reaching to halfway up the vehicle's overall height, the actual vehicle construction seems to cut them down to half this size, causing them to appear very small - but ultimately that mistake is not really a big concern for us. What matters more is how you continued pushing forward with the construction, and instead of attempting to correct the mistake, you accepted it as a part of the construction and continued working around it.
Aside from that mistake, it seems that you've done a good job of working with your orthographic plans. Your analyses were quite in-depth, and you were sure to establish as many landmarks as you needed, without going overboard with unnecessary subdivision where it did not help. You also demonstrated solid judgment when it came to some novel problems, like how you deal with the tractor in number 5 having 3 distinct components. You gave them each their own distinct bounding boxes, which helped you avoid more unnecessary subdivision, and also respected the fact that the cab and the tractor treads beneath them can rotate independently of one another, which really means that cramming them into the same bounding box wouldn't just be inconvenient, it would be less correct than the way you approached it.
All in all, your work is solid, and you've demonstrated a good grasp overall of the concepts covered in this course. So, I'll be going ahead and marking this lesson - and the course as a whole - as complete. Congratulations! I know you've been at this for quite some time, and that certainly has taken a great deal of willpower and patience - but you got through it, and have earned the accolades that come with it.
But of course, Drawabox isn't everything - what matters is what your goals are, and what you do next to move towards them. Best of luck!
A lot of my students use these. The last time I used them was when I was in high school, and at the time I felt that they dried out pretty quickly, though I may have simply been mishandling them. As with all pens, make sure you're capping them when they're not in use, and try not to apply too much pressure. You really only need to be touching the page, not mashing your pen into it.
On the flipside, they tend to be on the cheaper side of things, so if you're just getting started (beginners tend to have poor pressure control), you're probably going to destroy a few pens - going cheaper in that case is not a bad idea.
In terms of line weight, the sizes are pretty weird. 08 corresponds to 0.5mm, which is what I recommend for the drawabox lessons, whereas 05 corresponds to 0.45mm, which is pretty close and can also be used.
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