250 Box Challenge

Completing the whole box challenge - which certainly can take a long time - is indeed something we recommend (or in the purposes of pursuing official critique, require), though I completely understand why students might feel this is a very daunting task. But, as discussed in this section, that is a big part of why we engage in this challenge at all - to develop students' discipline, and to allow them to show themselves that even when a task is large and overwhelming, it can be broken down into pieces and tackled a bit at a time.

You should be using the Y method for constructing all of your boxes throughout this challenge. Not only is it an effective tool for constructing boxes in 3 point perspective (meaning boxes that are rotated arbitrarily in space, rather than aligned in any particular fashion to the direction the viewer is looking), it also leans into the focus of this exercise being on estimating our convergences. You can review how the Y method works here where it is introduced as part of the Organic Perspective exercise from Lesson 1.

Yes, they are very much part of the exercise, and should also be included when using this exercise in the future as part of your warmups.

This is addressed in more detail in the overview video for the box challenge, but the back corner is not something you should be fixating upon. Because it is generally the last part of the box we construct, whether or not it can come out correctly is already determined by the little mistakes we make in our other convergences. They accumulate, even the small discrepancies, and this will throw the back corner off. That is entirely normal, and not a problem.

You can rely on this approach based on the initial Y used to construct the box to determine which direction to extend your lines.

No, as discussed here in Lesson 0, there is no such thing as "0 point perspective", and more generally we do not force vanishing points to infinity - whether or not they are at infinity is determined by how the set of edges a VP governs is oriented in 3D space.

Though official critique does not include partial feedback, you can seek feedback on partial work from other students on our discord chat server (specifically in the #basic-challenges) exercise. Just keep in mind that as long as you're making a concerted effort to give yourself as much time as you need to absorb, follow, and apply the instructions to the best of your current ability, you should be fine. You may be assigned revisions to address any issues that come up, but they are usually fairly limited.