Assignment - Orthos to Invented Form

Lesson by

206

Assignments 29Lesson NotesDownloads 6

Assignment - Orthos to Invented Form

Lesson by

Marshall Vandruff

in The Perspective Course

206

Assignments 29Lesson NotesDownloads 6

Your assignment is to take a top-down plan (which only shows width and depth) and turn it into a 3D form by inventing the height. You can be creative—stretch, shrink, or flip parts, and even make pieces float. This is about training your brain to think in 3D.

Use graph paper or the plan templates in the downloads tab to make it easier on you
Feeling ambitious? Make up your own plans
You can also draw side and front views to better understand the form
Keep the shapes right-angled for now (no curves or bevels yet)

The main goal is to explore how different elevations can turn the same plan into many unique 3D shapes.

Deadline - submit by April 07, 2025 for a chance to be in the critique video!

Maria Bygrove

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11m

Gotta love brain puzzles :)

Vera Robson

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This is so much fun, both inventing shapes and looking at what others come up with! Selecting one each from my designs.

Sita Rabeling

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Hmm. Not sure. Maybe Lin meant this already. More practice might bring clarity.

Rick B

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14h

First set of using the same pattern. some how I feel I am not doing it right. and it should be a drawing like the one on the example. will try to come up with designs for the other two patterns.

J. Menriv

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15h

Assignment - Orthos to Invented Form 3 - After going through the three plans from the lesson, I figured I'd give it a shot with something a bit more elaborate—still keeping it simple with basic shapes.

Rick B

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14h

Very cool

J. Menriv

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19h

Assignment - Orthos to Invented Form 2

@20arnasdrawing23

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20h

So much to learn 🙂

J. Menriv

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22h

Assignment - Orthos to Invented Form 1

Rick B

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14h

you went all out on those. Very nice

Smithies

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Are you trying to kill us Marshall?? The video made these look fun. I ran into a lot of problems, so submitting part 1 early to seek help from the community! I tried to do it without using vanishing points - big mistake no.1. I retried the worst one with vanishing points, but none of my bits look like cubes! Is there an easy solution to this, or is it back to… draw 9999 boxes and they’ll start to look better? I might do my next one using isometric angles just to try and make it look understandable, but feel like maybe that is just cheating..? Maybe I should try and do both.

Lin

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See?! It looks so deceptively easy. I used the word “relaxing” when I started it 😆 Here are some tricks I found way too late: - lay out the all encompassing container and divide it first. My proportions are off because I realized way too late many divisions are neat units and I can use diagonals and squares to divide. - try working from the back towards the front of the viewer otherwise it might get difficult when everything in the front covers the back with lots of lines - different colors help a lot keeping things situated - drawing a vp grid very lightly on a loose light sketch at first from intuition slanting lines more and more on mindless setting can make things a lot easier because you’ll be matching and correcting these lines when you’re in the thick of it. I usually try both ways. If digital and the grid is accurate, I make the grid invisible then try on my own and switch it on to see how off I was. all in all these look great for no VPs!

Randy Pontillo

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I may be punching above my weight with the object i chose, but i think i learned enough from it to be worthwhile! A question for you!!! How do you keep an organic shape like this proportional across the ortho views? I spent considerable effort in the beginning trying to use my tools to keep things proportional, but since its a weird geometric/ organic hybrid shape, i ended up needing to eyeball everything anyway! The protractor is too curved, and the ruler/ squares are too straight, the paper trick helped when implemented with the top view, but it started to fail me once i moved to the oblique view.

Melanie Scearce

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I highly encourage you to try out one of the plans that Marshall included in the downloads section. It's manageably challenging, and you'll find that there are many creative ways to interpret simple shapes in the top view. Super fun exercise. Projecting a curves is a great skill to have in your toolkit. I made this to show how to do a simple projection. The helmet will require more complex structures but this is the basic idea. It's a bit out of the realm of this assignment but I hope that helps!

Lin

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I found these very challenging, my brain has been broken 😆

Lin

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Thank you guys. I swear I know things get smaller further back, Marshall. I am noticing all the division errors now that it’s been a while, can’t edit though x_x

Smithies

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these look so nice and clean! It doesn’t look like you struggled!

Jay Nightshade

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These look great!

@ashfin613

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@ashfin613

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Tried to boxify my bunny.

Lin

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I am excited for this one! Just one question please. I notice all the form oblique views are from the same camera angle (for lack of a better phrasing). They all have the same 2 point VPs. Is this just for consistency or a key part of an oblique view to be at a specific angle? So in our projects are we expected to keep this view (30 or 45 degrees) and play with height and depth, or can we do practically any turn?

Marshall Vandruff

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Lin, Any turn you like, any angle you like, at any degree. The 30° or 45° positions are for convenience because they are familiar. If you venture into very forshortened positions, you create new challenges, so take them up as you need new challenges.