250 Cylinder Challenge
11:52 PM, Thursday February 8th 2024
Hi there!!! This is my submission for the 250 Cylinders Challenge.
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9:23 PM, Tuesday February 13th 2024
Starting with your cylinders around arbitrary minor axes, I did notice some issues coming up within the first half or so of this section, but the second half generally tended to avoid these and came out more consistently well done, suggesting that you were indeed improving and learning from the process.
While one of the issues I noted in that first half really only came up once or twice (it's the reversed degree shift we see in cases like 13, where the farther end is narrower rather than wider), the other issue is much more frequent. It comes up in cases like 11, 12, 14, 21, 25, 28, 53, 70, 73 (among others), and the issue is that the vanishing point in the lengthwise dimension of the cylinder is forced to infinity, resulting in side edges that remain parallel on the page. This is actually an issue that is addressed specifically in the lesson material here, and so it does suggest that you may not have gone through the instructions as carefully as you could have. It's fortunate you ultimately corrected the issue yourself, because that sort of thing definitely does result in significant revisions if we have to call it out for the student.
Aside from that though, you've done a good job of fastidiously and consistently identifying the true minor axis alignment of your ellipses, and I can see that improving quite a bit over the set as well.
Carrying over into your cylinders in boxes, you are generally handling these correctly, although there's one key issue that I want to make sure you're aware of, as it does hinder the effectiveness of the exercise. 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.
The key issue that comes up is that you are not actually identifying the true minor axes for each ellipse - instead, you appear to be extending the line that passes through the center of each plane. This is independent of the ellipse itself, and so it does undermine the effectiveness of this error analysis process. In order for this process to be as effective as possible, we need to be checking three distinct line extensions per ellipse - the minor axis, and the two contact point lines. If we miss one, it's easy for mistakes to go unnoticed there.
I am still going to mark this challenge as complete, as that is something you can address yourself going forwards, but do take care in following those instructions to the letter going forwards. It's remarkably easy to miss something and have it severely impact the functional benefits of an exercise, in turn reducing the efficiency by which we actually develop our skills.
Next Steps:
Move onto Lesson 6.
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