The Web Page Of Doom

Color Photo

2011-12-20T19:04:00.001-08:00

Awesome gallery of depression era photos. Fantastic work.http://extras.denverpost.com/archive/captured.asp

Still Life

2011-11-11T08:00:00.001-08:00

This is a texturing/lighting project from last semester that I decided to make a little video of the process for. I've been saving stuff from my Push/Pull, too, so that will pop up soon. I think I'm going to keep this as a theme.

PProgress....

2011-11-10T23:41:00.001-08:00

DFA assignment turned in today. As with everything, there's so much that still needs to be done to it, but it will have to wait.

We started with thumbnails. I found it interesting to make random scribbles at high res, take a little section, then scale it down and back up so it loses resolution. The interpolation it does when it scales back up looks interesting, I think, as well as noise filters. Had a ton of fun.

Then we had to make some kind of sense of these things using characters we made in a previous assignment.

Then we picked one and ran with it, which is how I got the final at top.Some progress from the Push/Pull project. First one's my first render when I threw some lights in there, I love seeing where things start compared to where they end. It's interesting to see things so raw, with all the stand-in of where things get comped, where the bush goes, etc....

This is closer to where it's at, at the moment.Also, the basic blend shapes of my PP character. I just thought this was funny. He can do basic emoting now, but I plan on expanding the capacity of his facial rig after the semester is over, spend the winter making something REALLY pliable.Will post the animation when it's done :D

Animation Exercises

2011-10-31T11:40:00.000-07:00

First one is a silhouette assignment, emphasis on posing and clarity. Character's required to go through 3 different emotional states.

This one is a character waiting with a prop. I have a friend who seems to have an outright physiological impairment with respect to waiting for the microwave to finish. Without fail, he always, ALWAYS stops the microwave with a few seconds left. On top of it, he'll heat things about a third of the time he's supposed to, and ends up either taking forever to heat his food, or eating it cold.

Now I'm working on Push/Pull(pretty much what it sounds like, but with our own character this time).

Quick stuff

2011-08-02T23:17:00.002-07:00

Been doing stuff some nights after working on our game project with Polymath.

The last thing Captain Cook saw. Simplifying/stylizing, but still keeping some of that human anatomy I've spent so much time learning.

Thunder lizard, going to change the context of this one when I get back to it.

Trying to solidify the story behind this, going to work on the character more once I have his story.

Trying to make more images with some story, or at least a mood, in mind.

Observing, playing, trying to keep it loose.

Digital Doodles Part 3

2010-10-24T17:58:00.001-07:00

So, after a long postponement, here's another set of random doodles.

Didn't really post these chronologically, the above doodle was done earlier on than some of the others I posted. Regardless, it was significant to me in my quest to become comfortable with going straight in with color/value and being more aggressive. Also, it was clearly done very fast, which I like
Anyway, this was my first life drawing I did with my tablet over the summer. At some point i finally felt brave enough that it may be ok to pull it out in the life drawing class and try to do a live figure.

I'm leaving this here as a note to add a few more of the digital figures I did later on, since I don't have access to them at this particular moment. Also should put up a gouache sketch or two. Next will be some life drawings from the last semester(though most of them are back home in San Diego, I do have a few photos) followed by an animatic, with my animations after that. Then once I've posted my few paintings from the winter break, maybe I can finally get this damn thing to be a contemporary account of what I'm up to.

Digital Doodles Part 2

2010-10-24T17:35:00.000-07:00

So here are a few other bits. I played around a bit with different brushes, but a lot of the time I just constrained myself to the simple round brush and a chisel brush. I've tried to do a few digital drawings before, but it was always difficult. Especially dealing with brushes that I didn't really understand the function of, not to mention lacking a very good idea on how to apply them.

Here I used a bit of texture to play with some of the brushes I saw in the Gnomon video Barontieri did. I watched it several times during the semester, but had a hard time applying all of the brushes.
I felt like I could understand what I wanted to depict and how, but something wasn't working. At some point I figured it was that I simply didn't have enough experience with the basic idea of "painting" within Photoshop. I decided I needed to temporarily ditch the efforts to have tons of detail pop up really fast on its own. Because the truth is that the detail will never come up on its own because the brush is suddenly doing work for me. Experienced artists wield the brushes and settings in photoshop using their understanding of the fundamental ideas that are involved in art(light, form, color). I needed to focus on getting the big shit down right before I worried about the details in it. If I wanted details, there's no reason I can't do that with the basic brush. Then I also used the a chisel brush, to start getting myself accustomed to the various things that can be mapped to the pen tilt and stroke direction.
Occasionally I played with other little things here and there. But for the most part I made myself stick with the two simple brushes and just worry about trying to get used to some sort of work flow.

Work flow has been a big thing for me to figure out. It seems like everyone has dramatically varying methods. I decided at some point that drawing over an existing drawing doesn't seem to work as well for me. I usually did better if I only had a simple, relatively loose, sketch. Additionally, it seemed to help more as a reference to LOOK at, as opposed to photographing/scanning it and trying to color/paint over it. When I had a drawing already there, especially one I had worked into a bit, it seemed to get harder for me to get myself to just draw over it freely. I started to slow down and become overly meticulous.

The canyon bit above I did over a little doodle that I captured with my mac camera. I did a similar thing for the tibetan tower for perspective last year. The thing is, I feel like it's so quick to do so much digitally, doing things on paper is only really efficient(in terms of time/effort) for thumbnails and such. The time I spent on the tower, markering in value and such was not really very helpful. I ended up covering it anyway, and I could have done the value layout faster in PS.

I feel like it can definitely be helpful to have a drawing underneath(and all forms of reference make life so much better), but it's ultimately more beneficial to force myself to acquire a sufficient comfort with drawing straight into PS.

Just some thoughts.

Digital Doodles Part 1

2010-10-24T17:20:00.000-07:00

I was super stoked with how productive I stayed over the summer, but never showed anything for it. I posted a few gestures from the first day at life drawing only to realize I hadn't actually photographed most of it. But I figure at this point I should just try to get current and not worry about being comprehensive.

Blah, blah, blah, anyway.... I made myself do some regular digital doodles. Started off with my back yard, then I spent an hour or so painting a cup on my desk. So I'll do a few posts to dump out some of the stuff I did over the summer, then start updating with more recent stuff once I feel I've at least sampled what I did over the summer.

Summer Life Drawings

2010-09-24T00:05:00.000-07:00

Ok, so these are a few gestures from when I was doing some life drawing over the summer. I would rotate them properly, but honestly, I'd rather just try to get on with the postings and maybe, just MAYBE, make a regular habit of this. Then I'll work on the prettiness of the posts.

Anyway, I did a bunch of digital doodles over the summer, as well. I was hoping to get myself well acquainted with drawing on a tablet, since I'm going to be using one so much now. I'll try throw some of the summer digital doodles up next, with a sketch or two, perhaps.

After all of this, then I'm hoping to get myself to post things from the semester, though we're only really working on storyboards, so there's not much in the way of nice, finished work. Nor can I claim to know much about storyboarding(hence being in a class that teaches it), so I'm not really inclined to post much of the storyboarding. Perhaps later on in the semester I'll post a start/middle/end comp of how my storyboarding changed for the better. Things are already making more sense and I feel like I've improved a lot, even in the short time I've been back.

So, here are the gestures, stay tuned for more! :D

Semester Animations

2010-05-10T12:37:00.001-07:00

Right.... so, here are some animations from this semester

First there's the animal jump where we design an animal character, then animate them in a ~10 second story where they jump(with a PURPOSE!).

Untitled from Anguel Bogoev on Vimeo.

This is a walk cycle where we designed a biped character of some kind, then animate it walking. I decided to do a pirate with a peg leg.

Pirate walking with peg leg from Anguel Bogoev on Vimeo.

I'll try and find my ball bounce with interactions assignment, next.

Lost and Found!

2010-04-23T09:58:00.001-07:00

So, I found my sketchbook and I've been so absent-minded about my blog that I didn't think for three weeks to post that I'd found it.

Well, i've been doing some animating, some painting, drawing, all that great art school stuff! I intend to upload some stuff tomorrow, including a pointillist painting of a fish, which I really enjoyed.

My walk cycle final feels like it's coming along, hopefully I can get everything worked out properly by tuesday. I'll likely make one post of all my animations from this semester at the end of next week.

Free Sutff!

2010-01-27T13:34:00.000-08:00

Me on the left, with Paulo(fellow CA) on the right.

So, I went to a little demo by Prismacolor at my campus book store today. At the end of it they had a drawing, and a bunch of my friends got cool free stuff(such as Paulo and his Warm Gray set in the picture). I didn't win anything, unfortunately :(

Luckily, I was in the convenient position of having brought my laptop along, and was showing a friend a marker render that I did, so that he could see what color the French Grays come out to. When Diana(the woman giving the demo) saw it, she decided to give me two marker holders full of markers, and asked me to e-mail her the pictures!

BOOYAH!! :D

Here are the pictures I had onhand.

More Norse

2010-01-24T00:22:00.000-08:00

So, the day before we had a little sketch thing here. The assignment was to spend the hour drawing a design of a "space viking". I was stoked, since I was looking to do an actual Norseman as part of the previous character design bit. Unfortunately, I showed up for the last 10 minutes of the little event, because I got caught up animating in the lab. So I madly scribbled away whatever came to mind in light blue pencil, so that it would be easy to edit it if there was anything interesting to salvage from the rushed doodling.

Anyway, afterward I did a short little doodle of a more cartoony image of a space viking(below). Then did some scribbles, making a random robot shape or two.

Tonight I took a few minutes with the Space-Viking and quickly markered/inked it in. I really want to learn how to ink well enough that my fantastic inking can overpower the shortcomings of a drawing. This would make me most happy. I think I'm going to start inking up more of my drawings so that I can start moving toward this goal.

Still Life

2010-01-20T22:20:00.000-08:00

I hate traditional still lifes. You know, the fruits/bowls and shit? I just don't understand the motivation to spend so much time regularly drawing mundane objects. I understand studying them to understand the structure, but this never seems to go under the "still life" designation. Those always appear to be called "studies", instead. It also seems that teachers never want to assign to go break down how chairs are built or something, instead I get an assignment to see if I can render value, with my subject being a bunch of mundane objects. I think that the issue is that I want to draw a specific thing. For example, don't tell me to draw a house, or some pears, tell me to draw THAT house. I suppose the core of my negative attitude is that they're non-descript subjects(which means they're very uninteresting and lacking personality), I have to do a strict render(which means I can't stylize and ADD personality), and that I feel like I've done enough of these to finally merit the opportunity to try rendering exercises with imaginary forms. Instead of all of these mundane subjects, how about letting me practice imaginary forms?

I know that the extent of my aversion to still lifes is uncalled for. But for whatever reason they just bother the hell out of me. I'm fine with the idea of doing a study to understand how to execute some object's look in a larger project.... but spending several hours doing a composition with such objects is somehow devastating to my work ethic. Granted, I still do it, though I somehow can't help but bitch and grumble :/

Basically, if I'm going to be drawing lifeless objects, don't make me do just 4 shots and spend hours on each, let me do quick breakdowns. If I'm going to be doing an intensive render, let me do it of a more interesting object, or let me add life and a piece of myself to it. Strict renders of simple objects don't let me do that.

Ragnarok Is Nigh!!

2010-01-09T05:50:00.000-08:00

So, I sit here at almost 6 in the morning, working on designs for characters present at the Ragnarok.... posting up some in progress images, partly to keep myself in this habit, and partly to show others working on the same thing where I'm at.

First is a Frost Giant. I was originally thinking of Modi, but my understanding is that he was on the side of the gods(Thor being his father). Also, I have another little sketch that I feel is more in keeping with what I've read of Modi's character, this one's intended to be scary and menacing(part of my sketch for his face is in the upper right, where his big grin is visible).

Granted, Modi could be friendly to the gods and still be menacing. Reading into Norse mythos, it's pretty aparent why the Giants hated the gods. The gods were dicks. Still, the character in my mind is a little less visually frightening, so I'll see if I can get something done for him.

This is the above Giant's axe. I was thinking of naming it 'God Slayer', or something along the lines of killing the divine, or bringing about a terrible death. I'll ask my Icelandic friend if he knows of something fitting that I could use, along with appropriate symbols in the design. Currently there's a symbol that, according to some chart, can mean man or death. The triangle thing is a valknut. My thinking being that it bestows men with the valknut(knot of the fallen).
Jormungandm, The Serpent.
Still working on this marker rendering, bringing out the form. I'm implementing my nice new French Gray markers I got for christmas and my new large, chisel-tip Copic markers :D
The thing on the right of him is a possible tail, still haven't decided whether or not I want to put it on(hence my not having gone around that area yet). I was thinking of something slug-like when I began with this. I know the descriptions are of him as a serpent, but I was hoping to make it scarier by disconnecting it a bit from more conventional creatures. Having the teeth run all the way up the jaws would probably help make it look more menacing.... though i've markered in too far for that now. But I suppose when I start making digital variations, I'll try that out.This is another version of Jormungand that I did. I sort of think this looks cooler, but it's also more conventional. Personally, I think I could make this look good more easily. However, I'm going to stick it out with the other, in order to facilitate greater opportunity for exploration.

Enough chatter, back to work!

Perspective

2010-01-04T18:54:00.000-08:00

So, here are two of my perspective drawings from the semester. I am still trying to build that accursedly difficult habit of uploading things regularly. I had to scan all of my life drawings for my final, but neglected to sift through for the ones I feel like posting. Also, I've sort of fallen a bit further out of the blogging habit. We'll see if I manage to stay more on top of it this semester.

So this first one was my final assignment. It wasn't really our "final", per se, since we only had a little bit of time left in the semester to do it. I think I went further than most people did with there's, taking the time to do some basic lighting with a ball point pen. Still, the structure of the building is all just whatever geometry I had the time to figure out properly and draw before I ran out of time. The giant dice falling toward it were sort of a random addition, because we had to have an object falling toward our 3pt construct. So I decided to have two dice throwing snake eyes at the building.

This one was our second 2pt project, which I neglected and just sort of rolled with this idea I got in my head. The building and any perspective I had to figure out is sort of dwarfed by the relative size of everything else. I got all into the idea of doing some sort of tibetan building up in the mountains, the result being this tower over a waterfall. Hopefully in the future I'll feel more confident with my digital drawing abilities that I'll be able to design a more interesting building, without worrying that I can't actually execute it.

Life Drawings

2009-10-27T14:02:00.000-07:00

Here are some life drawings from earlier in the semester that I kept saying I'd post.

Ballpoint Pen Gestures. 30 seconds - 1 minute eachStereometric exercise, to study mass and volume. 5 minutes

This is where we started adding simple faces. 5 minute posesMore recent drawings. 7 minute poses

Frustration and Elation

2009-09-25T10:18:00.000-07:00

So, I'm at Ringling. I'm stoked to be here, teachers are awesome, I like my work that I'm doing, feel productive and that I'm learning a lot.

The only problem is that, though I got my PC sent over, it refuses to output any kind of image on my monitor. This is the same monitor that was functioning on it the week before my parents sent it over. I got someone to give me a ride to Best Buy to get a vga/dvi converter, but I got the dvi/vga instead, so it's useless. So not only can I not test the stupid thing out to see if it will work at all in my other port, but I can't get any animations done for the Thief's Tale.

On top of that, I have a shitload of nothing to show from school. Since my only camera is my spiffy cellphone which, for all its damned spiffiness, does NOT function with Macs(the school gives you a nice mac laptop for work, but no Maya). This means I can't upload sketches and whatnot to perform a public display of pride in the personal artistic strides I feel I'm making here.

Gladiators!

2009-08-04T02:52:00.000-07:00

Here are some sketches form the movie Gladiator.

Haven't really decided what I want for the Diablo 3 class we were designing. My character was a soul eater, gets stronger based on how many enemies he's killed(counter's set to zero upon death), with various powers based on trapping souls, consuming souls, summoning spectres, allowing him to heal by consuming souls, etc.... the original concept was that the main direct effect of his soul consumption was that he grew bigger and stronger, from lookin malnourished upon start, to being large and in charge after consuming a few hundred.

Anyway, I have some small thumbnails, so I plan on developing them with at least some more defined silhouettes to post soon.

In the mean time, I'm going to be animating more for The Thief's Tale, and I am going to do a small, silly animation of a seal on my animation desk! Yes, classical 2d!!!! ZOMFG!!!!1!1one1!!!1!!

More Sketcheszzz!

2009-07-27T00:09:00.000-07:00

So here is my drawing of a boxer from one of the sketch sessions.... I wasn't too happy with any of my characters that day.... so here are "The Mullet God", and some french or italian boxer. I had a few interesting ideas, but those ideas didn't turn out too well technically, so I'll get back to figuring them out a bit more in the visual department at a later point.

Here are two other random sketch pages. One with various vehicles I drew one day, and another with scribbles from a visit to the natural history museum. Crappy photo of hte second one, but it's not like many people read this that don't know me enough to have seen these physically :P

More Sketchyness

2009-07-23T00:24:00.000-07:00

A few sketches from our sitting drawing from Constantine.

Sketchyness Of Might!

2009-07-04T23:46:00.000-07:00

We didn't have a warm-up for the flying creatures, since it ended up being just three of us that day.

Anyway, here are some of the flying creatures I sketched out:

The thing on the left is the fae of a non-sensical flying serpent that's thumbnaild at the bottom(circled). I was thinking it could live on some gaseous moon, where it pretyt much swims through the air. The thing on the right fits better into the diablo univers(IMO).

Lastly, a mystical floating frog man. When he drops his magic pinky, everyone that witnesses the event dies. His eyes glaze over so that he can't witness it, which protects him through the power of silly, literal clauses that seem to be so common in fantasy stories and lore.

But Wait!!

2009-07-04T03:51:00.000-07:00

I mentioned in the previous post that I was photographing sketches.... does this mean....could it be?

*GASP!!*

I'm actually going to post some of the things I've been drawing for the past few weeks!! I finally found a little bit of motivation(insomnia) to photo/post.

I'm going to do several posts of drawings. In planning this will work out as an individual post for each of the sketch sessions, along with a few miscellaneous images here and there. I want to avoid posting in really large blocks and try to get myself a little more regular(fiber doesn't seem to help blog regularity like it does for bowels).

I opted out of posting the demon I designed the first day because I'm not that huge on the design, and hope to at least do a nicer version of it if I'm going to show it for all of the world to see.

Posts!!

2009-07-04T03:48:00.000-07:00

Here's a little thing I drew just now, after taking a break from photographing a bunch of sketches.

Just a fun doodle with my wacom. Messed around with brushes a bit more extensively, and just scribbled until some kind of form began to evolve :)

Depression Extreme

2009-06-11T13:44:00.000-07:00

So it seems that I somehow overwrote a folder with various animations I did with an older version of that folder from another computer in the mac labs at school. I hadn't opened up that specific folder for a while to notice it, however. Now the drives at the mac labs are going to be wiped, and I lack several files of relatively high importance....

fuck!

Now I'm not sure what to do. I wanted to get all of this done by the end of this month, but this is a severe setback. I sent a scale-back proposal to fall back on so that things can still be finished according to schedule. Well, my personally intended schedule, at least.

I should end this post and set up a plan for how to finish everything according to schedule and avoid having to scale back on any features(specifically, a higher resolution version of the animations).

Off to planning I go! Then to sculpting :D

Productivity Abound!

2009-06-06T01:09:00.000-07:00

Well, it's beena long time since I've breathed life unto any new posts on any of my blogs.... this isn't because I stopped doing anything. On the contrary, i've been relatively busy and like applying my time more to working on things than showing them off to the world. While I realize it's contrary to the general purpose of this blog, I have been quite productive :)

I didn't get the internship I was hoping for at Incinerator, and the few other ones I found and applied for didn't respond.... so let us(me) release a collective(but really singular) sigh in light of this unfortunate news.... *sigh*

Anyhoo, I'm still working on things. Haven't been able to animate, since I can't get Maya installed properly on my new computer.... but it does run very fast when I open up the internet :)

I have a small list of the aforementioned "various things" I've been working on:

Firstly, I joined a sculpting class. It's fun, I as least feel like I'm learning something, though the proof will be in the pudding(which will hopefully look more like a finely crafted female figure).

I am going to do two small 2d animations.

I am going to finalize my god damned animation desk that I started building last fall. Well, I built it relatively quickly, but it was a painfully long while before I could move it into my room and USE it. Now I want to make some changes.

I've been quite productive in a sketch group I started with some artist friends. We practice quick sketches for a few hours, then spend the rest of the day designing various characters according to a specific theme(I'll post more on this a little later....which will hopefully not be a month from now). I just got back from an 11 hour long session about an hour ago :)

The follow ups to these designs will be digital paintings of the designs. So hopefully I can get some amount of good experience in digital painting from that.

Will be working on a small iTouch game. Not going to say anything about it, because I haven't even cemented the story/visual style(which is the most important aspect that I'm working on).

Also, I'm going to start painting traditionally!! :D I'll either do my first attempt on sunday or monday.

ZOMGzOMB"e"-FIED_ANT!! lol!

2009-04-22T20:41:00.001-07:00

Last week in the Game Design class I was asked if I could draw a zombie ant. I made the mistake of saying yes, which merited the response to do it immeadiatly. So I went up to the whiteboard and started scribbling with a marker, not knowing what the HELL I was doing. I mean, I didn't even have the vaguest idea of what a zombie and should look like.

I still don't have too good of an idea, but I'm proud to say that I did end up with some kind of image, or image-esque thing on the board that seemed to be mildly entertaining to the student body.

I'll rotate the image at a later date, I just felt like posting it up now, rather than post-poning for a month.

Demo Reel

2009-04-02T01:52:00.000-07:00

I created a demo reel to apply for various internships. I am currently most hopeful for Incinerator. They're near by, and either the EA or Insomniac internships would likely have to pay substantially just so that I can simply break even(with paying to live in LA and all). Since I'm going to go to Ringling, however, I'll be needing all of the money I can get!

So, anyways, here's my demo reel that I created to apply for various internships.

March 2009 Demo Reel from Anguel Bogoev on Vimeo.

I plan on replacing the 11 second club animation with whatever I animate this month, since that was my first attempt at character animation, and I'm sure this one will be much better(especially since I gots more time :P ). Or perhaps I'll animate to last month's audio, since I really liked it, but didn't have time because I had to finish up my contract-work.

Also, I created a portfolio blog. The video is viewable there, as well, along with my resume. I read somewhere(perhaps it was the Insomniac site) that said that, upon linking to a blog with work, they want to see recent work only, not a large page with your progression.

Thus, I decided to have a dedicated portfolio blog, which will only ever have two posts(with my most recent demo reel and resume). I hope you all enjoy! :D

Student Gallery!

2009-04-02T01:51:00.000-07:00

Ok, so I was feeling disappointed in myself the previous week. I have become so dedicated to art and progression. Yet I haven't made the effort to submit a more presentable work to a gallery of any kind. I didn't submit anything to the Bavura(Palomar's art catalogue), and I had overlooked submitting something in the student gallery. Luckily, Mike asked for some life drawings from David and I, to put up in the student exhibit! I was stoked, and grabbed my favorite life drawings to submit. I didn't get to submit my latest head drawing project(which I am quite proud of), but I'm personally more "into" life drawing, anyways. I'll post pics of the two life drawings and the head drawing soon :)

Right Handedness

2009-03-18T01:48:00.000-07:00

Ok, so a while back my friend Adam decided that on one of the life drawing poses he'd draw with his right hand. Being left-handed, like myself, this was going to be quite the task for him. He pulled me into doing the same thing, and the two of use subsequently pressured Miguel into doing the same.

Adam's drawing was notably inferior to his primary hand. Miguel actually had nicer drawings when he went with his secondary(left).... so that was interesting.

Even though I worked super slowly, I was able to get a surprisingly good drawing out of my right arm. I followed it up with a second one. I feel like I should train this ability to draw alternately. Perhaps I can one day learn to draw with both hands at once, sketching roughs out with my right hand, and then following with a render through my left....right....

Well, I can dream, can't I?

Number 1

Number 2

One Fine Day

2009-03-05T01:18:00.000-08:00

with a woof an' purr, a baby was born and it caused a little stir.... does anyone but me remember the CatDog theme song?

Well, it doesn't matter, because on March 4th, I received my acceptance letter from Ringling!

WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOT!!!!

Ok, now that that's out....

Today was, indeed, a fine day.

I started off the day by missing the first half hour of life drawing(oops!). Now, normally it really pisses me off when I miss warmups because it can be really hard for me to draw if I haven't gotten a few loose scribbles out first. I seem to always have to push out an ugly looking scribble before I can draw a coherent anything.

However, today I didn't have time for my warmup, and I decided to screw trying to get some gestures out of the model's longer pose in favor of just going for it. This turned out to be a good move, because I felt really good about that and the subsequent drawing I got out today(technically, yesterday). So it was only two, but I'm really quite pleased with them.

Aside from this, David(Patel) asked me to borrow my knife. I'm not sure where it went, so I apologized that I couldn't oblige. Fortunately, someone else noted a small steak knife they had found. David used the knife to tint his newsprint and gave it to me to add to my collection :-P

Yay! Free knife!

Then I went to lunch with friends, followed by head drawing. This class was time to follow up on the live drawings we started the previous class. I'm pretty happy with the head, as well. The result was, indeed, quite satisfying. I think Mike's going to mark me down if I don't get more light variation into it, so it's not quite done, but I like the way it's headed.

This was followed up by the Game Design class. It was an interesting class, focusing on story, and I came up with an interesting idea on navigating cutscenes that I don't believe has yet been implemented(I'll try to find time to elaborate on this in its own post). Adam called during the class. I'm actually kind of disappointed that the teacher didn't react quick enough to take my phone and answer before I hung up. I honestly forgot he had the policy, and was just trying to stop the noize ASAP.

I later found out that he called to invite me to go see Watchmen on Friday, to which I responded with a "Fuck, yeah!". I've been waiting in great anticipation for the movie, it looks interesting, and the comic has a reputation that I shouldn't even have to bring up.

This chat happened when I was right outside my house. As I walked to the door, I felt really happy with how the day had gone.

But wait! There's more!

Apparently that day had seen the arrival of a package. This package was from Ringling. I quickly figured that this meant I was surely accepted, since there's no reason to ship a package in order to tell someone they didn't make it in. Obviously, I was correct.

The interesting thing is, I have a strangely calm feeling about this whole thing. I move between being happy, to being almost indifferent, to being EXTREEEEEEEMELYFUCKINGEXCITED!! My thoughts range between feeling something along the lines of, "Well, no shit I got in." to "Man, I didn't really expect to get in."

Funny how our experience act as a sieve for our hindsight. I can't remember clearly how I felt about the whole thing in general. I know I ranged through different feelings on the matter, but I can't remember how I felt most of the time.

Well, I better be off to dreamland to get some rest. I have a rig to finish and begin animating tomorrow! Also, at some point(tomorrow, perhaps) I have a bunch of drawings I'd liketo upload. I don't know why, but I have obtained a specific lvoe for life drawing. When I draw figures from life, I feel like I could be there all day. The world could pass me by and I wouldn't care. I guess everyone has a simple activity that they find great joy in doing.

Sketchbook!

2009-02-12T15:57:00.000-08:00

An idea that popped into my head to make a more realistic version of mario that weilds a giant sledgehammer, I considered showing him compacting the craniums of the Ninja Tutrles with it....but I like the Ninja Turtles, they have a close spot in my heart to my inner child. Perhaps I'll just make a ninja-esque Koopa Troopa? Or maybe he's just a stoned moron who smashes some little girl's helpless turtles....so much potential!
One of the translators in the Game Design class. Yes, I realize her chair is floating.... artistic liberties I say!
Behold, the mighty hand! I should collect all of these drawings from the backs of worksheets and make a post with just those....
At some point I want to do some more abstract lettering, come up with a nice WildStyle.... haha, "bewegen"....was that a note one what it means? I think I can see "ove" to the right of it. So it's plausible it said move.
As I sat in class, somehow a caveman just magically appeared on my syllabus and distracted me from having to hear the teacher read aloud what I'd already seen on the paper :P Not that you can blame her, since so many people avoid reading the syllabus before they draw on it.
Some head sketches for my head drawing class. We have to do 10 per week. Hmmmm....this picture isn't too contrasty....at some point I endeavor to fix all of these....though I probably won't, since that same amount of time could be taken to redo most of the crappy ones.
Gestures of dolphins at SeaWorld. This, and the design of the skeleton character that I posted in November were in my portfolio, everything else here is just random sketchbook stuff.
The full body was sniped from some dude lingering at a counter for a bit.
I want to do more cowboy drawings....maybe later tonight....technically morning....stupid technicalities!
Someone mentioned Alice In Chains. I considered simply drawing Alice(Wonderland Alice), then adding a chain to her ankle. But then I figured that there's no reason for her to seem modest at all. If she's chained down, I feel it more fitting to be in a compromising state. This is another one I definitely want to work into a more impressive project at some point.

This goofy sailor also makes an appearance on the next page, in the form of marker ink bleeding through the page :P
Just having some fun....the big guy's hard hat has nothing to do with who he is, just a random addition I felt like putting in there. As a random note to myself, I think I'll call him Glago, and I have the sudden urge to develop him as a character.
I'd really like to do an illustration of this concept at some point....

Faces, and the muscle groups of the back. This was around when we were assigned an anatomy study to illustrate, so I'd been looking at a bunch of diagrams to see how the superficial muscles connect.
Various figure doodles.
Punk Rock Santas are the highlight of this one. I was going to draw one onto my friend's Guitar Hero controller(he has one of the blank white ones), but he didn't want Santa because it's too seasonal.

Leemurs and a punk rock santa. I liked the stylized heart, but I ruined it by not realizing that the markers wouldn't do well with the pen ink :-(
Bunch of random doodles, along with my attempt at making an excessively cute and cheeky Leemur.
So, this is a bunch of drawings I did when I had to wait all day at the Ottogar in Istanbul. I had no money, no objects to entertain me, no food, no water....so I decided to suck myself into learning how to draw hands. I spent a couple of hours just sitting and staring....then slowly started drawing until it got dark.

That's it for now :D

Follow Up....

2009-02-12T14:46:00.000-08:00

Not quite sure if I included all of these.... I'll check and edit it later....
Head I modeled the fall before last, intending to make blenshapes for it(hence the smirking one on the right), but I decided to move my efforts to other things, not to mention the fact that there are many high-quality, pre-made rigs that I can use for this....I hope to enter the 11secondclub contest this month, so I'll be sure to upload my entry at the end of the month.
Here's a shot of the render passes, for the game character I did for "Thief's Tale", along with the final output image for the game.... I really wish they could have been higher-res.... but "The Designer", alas, is not "A Programmer", though he is, unfortunately, "The Programmer". Though we do now have an actual programmer, so hopefully the new engine will allow us to have a higher resolution version.
Wire frame view of the skeleton model I decided to show off.

I was told that some 3d examples would be good, so here's a repost of the alien head I modeled in Maya. Though modeling, and more specifically texturing is not my thing, nor do I plan on it becoming my main "thing".This came with a huge, long winded description of the features of the rig I built. Actually, rigS in the plural. Since I rigged and animated 3 characters. Now I built another rig for a small project that I, unfortunately, am not allowed to talk about :(

I hope that I can one day not have to build my own rigs and can concentrate solely on animating....becasue this shit of having to spend half my constantly tiny time constraints on rigging is really getting annoying.
Another repost of a shot from the Catacomb I made for last March's Gnomon modelling competition.... I blame the loss on having only 4 days for a month-long competition, and not having very good composition.

Now I'm off to eat lunch, then get to work on that 11secondclub contest!

There are a few sketchbook shots missing....I'll add those in a final update later today....

Ringling Portfolio!

2009-02-12T14:15:00.001-08:00

So I finally found some motivation to update this thing....first things I have on hand are my life drawings, not sure where I left the images of my few other things....I'll acquire them shortly though. I will follow it up shortly with a pair of special life drawings I did at the start of this current semester. Everything is numbered in sequence, a few of them may be out of order, but if so, it's only by one or two spots.Early drawing, nothing too special.Van is by far one of the best models....too bad we don't seem to see much of him.Another early gesture drawing.These were some of the first pastel bits we did in life drawing, I believe this was the second set.More early gestures.I mainly like this one because I had a lot of fun with the style :)

I believe this was the second or third cloth practice we did. Pastel drawing, with the same pose taken afterward and charcoal to render the fabric.

I think this was my first set of pastel gestures....the numbers should reveal all to you.

This one was fun. Ink and white conte or something of the sort on a thick construction paper.More gestures!!

I'll go hunt down those other images now....

Wordy Words With Extra Wordyness

2009-01-02T17:57:00.000-08:00

Hmmmm, so I'm on the verge of sending my application to Ringling(nothing to do with Ringling Bros. Circus).

I spent some dealing with the essay question I have to write....

I feel relatively confident that I didn't say anything stupid that would make them not want me.

But now I don't know what to submit in my portfolio.

Yes, I know, my "Best Stuff", "that which I want to represent who I am".

My question that I ask whenever I consider anything is, "Do I really want this to represent me?".

I'm just nervous, I guess.

Anyways, i'ma hold off on the final submission until the 14th or so, keep sketching away in the mean time.

Wish me luck with my application!

Michelangelo-like Marvel!

2008-11-16T02:04:00.000-08:00

So, I made my first sculpture of my life today. Ok, not including some things i vaguely recall messing around with when I was 8. We got some clay a month or two ago and I finally found some motivation to sculpt with my dad. My dad used to be relatively good, but that was when he was younger than me, so he's obviously a wee bit out of practice. I'm excited to watch him as he gets back into it though, I think it'll be pretty cool.

As a side note, I feel like there's some joke to be made about how it's a clay rubber duck....of DOOM!

In This, Our Time of Reckoning

2008-11-15T17:00:00.000-08:00

I find myself feeling extremely satisfied with myself and the work I have done over the past two weeks.

Especially the past four days, tuesday to friday.

Something inside of me turned me into a machine. I have been dedicated to the animations for the game to an extent that I'm pretty sure classifies me as obsessed. It's as if there's a spigot of work ethic inside of me that opened up and told me "WORK!!".

I have slept a total of 10 hours over the past 4 days. In that time I modeled two additional characters, animated all of the hero's sprites(111), another 121 sprites for the Skeleton enemy, and another 121 for the Knight and all of his actions.

So The Designer said he wrapped up the demo we've worked on for IGF and now it's just a matter of waiting.

In the mean time though, my work ethic doesn't feel like it's fading, so i'm still plugging away. I made a walk cycle for the skeleton character, and all of the character portraits. I've also resolved to do at least one walk and one run cycle every week. Since I was able to make something passable in about 40 minutes, I think that using a bit of my free time over the course of a week and fordcing myself to create full action cycles within this time frame will be great practice. On second thought, I'm thinking that the rules I impose myself should be one movement cycle(running, hopping, walking, skipping, swimming, etc....) and one non-cyclical action.

Also, i'm going to see if I can get myself to start consistantly sketching. I draw for my classes, but my ethic towards drawing extra-carricularly is significantly below where I want it to be.

With that said, here are the three reference sketches for the 3 characters i've modeled so far. I'll upload that characters themselves later on.

Knight, an enemy character.

Skeleton. Inspired by the Ray Harryhausen skeletons in Jason and The Argonauts.

Lastly we have the protagonist....of DOOM!!

I had almost forgotten that convention(of DOOM!) that I intended to use at some point in every post....of doom.

The Time of Reckoning Fast Approaches

2008-11-11T03:32:00.000-08:00

So.... with only a few days left, it is very unfortunate that I have so many assignments to do this week. Including writing a speech, an After Effects project, and silhouettes for my next illustration project.

This is to be done in the same time that I try and crunch out my characters/animations for said characters in record time. With Tuesday(today), Wednesday, and Thursday being the days that I conceivably have to finish(maybe Friday morning too? though unlikely in the extreme).

So here is the final rig over which I have lost so much sleep as of late.

Wait....I can fix that! I can TOTALLY fix that....

*Ten Minutes Later*

Though I think the Grand, Stretchy-Armed, Groping Groin-Grab of DOOM! would be a very effective fighting technique for him, it would have caused cohesion problems with his fellow actors :P
Ok, so I think I've frozen everything's transforms, zeroed out all positions, checked all the orients, etc, etc....

The one thing i'm still worried about is the spine. I've never used one like it before and i'm kind of nervous about how it will work out.

Here he does his voodoo dance of anti-life induction(better known as "death").

Ok, so now that that's done. Tomorrow i'll make the Knight, though it was supposed to be done LAST week, the rig obviously delayed me quite a bit. So these time constraints obviously also mean that i'm going to be transfering over animations between characters. Though I do have the Skeleton model sheet done too, so hopefully I can get a version of those in as well to make up for my tardyness.

Now i'm off to bed, in order to get 5 or so hours of sleep before getting up to do my other projects, animate this little sucker, go to school, do my After Effects project, and then go home to do more game work. At some point in the day i'll also have to write and rehearse my speech :\

P.S. I realize that he doesn't have eyeballs OR a sword. I also realize that his frontal silhouette is weak, but luckily he won't be SEEN from the front. With that, i'm off to bed before i pass out in my chair xP

....and now back to our scheduled programming....

2008-10-27T03:02:00.000-07:00

Well, it seems I failed miserably in keeping this thing regularly updated with progress.

Since I didn't get the internship, I decided to spend one more summer in Bulgaria. This turned out to be a generally poor decision. On the plus side, some may say the generally poor experience built character. I am inclined to believe this, if only because it would explain the 5 or 6 different voices in my head as recently built characters.

In other news, I have been conscripted for a quick little project with a fellow student in one of my classes. This project requires from me that I animate several characters. Whilst this is very appealing, there has been some stress in trying to compress any of this activity into my schedule. Not only that, but our lack of a dedicated modeler leaves the work to me.

The positive outcome of all of this is that I get a bit of experience, and all of this work is work I can generally fit my preparation for into one class or another. So that puts a big, stupid, toothy grin on my face :D

So hopefully i'll have made it through all of these rigging tutorials on my list by the time i'm done with the model, so that I can plunge straight into rigging the damn thing. The one issue with this is that I had planned to get the model done some time around....let's see.... today!!

Unfortunately I was delayed significantly by another project i'm working on, an animation desk. But more on that in a later post.

Anyways, here's what little progress I have made with the model. I plan on punching out the rest on Tuesday morning, and to hopefully magically finish a rig too.

I borrowed the new Intuitive Animation by Gnomon from a friend. It has me quite inspired, and hopefully i'll be able to produce some kick-ass animations for this thing.

Oh, right. Here is the blog of the project's designer. It's quite the entertaining read.

Hmmm....it's an interesting futility when I, possessing a blog with fewer readers than his solitary reader(me), am making a referral to his site.

More Stuff

2008-05-25T22:11:00.000-07:00

To prove that I DID actually do SOMETHING during the semester, I'm uploading a bunch of the stuff I did.
First one is my first ZBrush model I made this semester. If it's not readily apparent what it is, i've failed miserably.
Then I have the monster i've been working on as of late, which is nearing completion.

This gives a sense of the relative scale of the legs and head to the body.

Here the shell normal maps are more visible.

Here is the final shot, showing the skinned rear leg. Most of the detail is from the normal map i painted in photoshop.

Everything else that's worth mentioning was previously posted, and I hope to have a finished version of the creature posted shortly.

Catacomb

2008-03-31T23:26:00.000-07:00

Here's my catacomb submission....

Wish me more luck....

2008-03-31T00:27:00.000-07:00

Well, needing a place to post some kind of work to show for my internship application, I decided that this would suffice.

First up is my WIP for my Maya modeling class. This will eventually become the head to a much larger alien, of which I plan to post shots as soon as I can get back on my school computer(tuesday). I plan on taking this into ZBrush on tuesday to give it a nice displacement and normal map set.

Here is a shot of the alien head comparing a few slight modifications in shaded(above) and wire(right) views.

This is my own interpretation of the Parthenon. More recent image soon to follow. I have yet to decide how to do the tiles on top. I don't have the desire to send the poly count up another 100k just to add tiles, but I know not of any implementation for parallax mapping in maya, which would be great. I'll probably just create a displacement for it, if I don't find anything. If anyone happens upon this humble blog and does know, please do share with a comment.

Lo and behold my second ever head model. The nose needs some more work, but his main purpose was to make some blend shapes. Though this has been put on the back-burner until my semester is over.

Here's an eyeball I made to complement the head. Once school's out I hope to give him proper skin too(SSS woot!).

Now to prove that I do at least know of the existance of color, here's the first dirty iteration of a shield, one of hopefully many props which will populate the Parthenon. I decided to mess with Maya's procedurals to try and make the leather, which I think has some potential.

Hopefully you enjoyed my stuff, more to come soon.

If only, if only....

2008-03-29T18:44:00.001-07:00

If only I had started working on this project sooner, like the beginning of the month, as opposed to a few days ago.... If only I had anticipated that I wouldn't end up competing in the Pan-Americans....

On the plus side, I'm definately having fun with this project. Though the deadline for the Gnomon catacombs challenge is in.....very few days.... it has gotten me to work, as opposed to just fiddling around with small experiments as I usually end up doing. The reason i'm actually posting this is so that I can ask everybody I know how bright this looks to them, because apparantly my monitor's set relatively bright. Hopefully this will allow me to better gauge what people will be seeing. I also hope the final image will be something I can be proud of....I guess we'll find out in about a day or so. Wish me luck!

More Eye-Candy

2008-03-03T18:03:00.000-08:00

Ok, it's been a while since my little rant on graphics. Let me clarify a few things that I don't think came across quite right.

1. The main point was that having a consistent art style, and clean graphics is what's most important. For example, Prey was touted as having amazing detail....but the people's faces looked rubbery, it made them look less like humans and more like moving manakins. I feel it would have been better to sacrifice the detail provided in their normal maps in exchange for proper specularity, or some other such trade between resources.

2. Graphics should be advanced as much as possible. I merely mean to say that they should take a back seat to the game itself. As I mentioned, I kept getting lost in various areas in Halo 3; the reason being that they were adding so much detail that few things really stuck out as saying "Go Here". In the earlier games, any glowing and/or transparent box denoted a power up of some kind. In Halo 3 I witnessed various objects with these same properties....but they did nothing.

3. If physics is actually implemented in the GAME( not just in terms of what you see, but in terms of what you have to do to get through the game), then they deserve just as much attention. I recall reading an article that said that there was only one programmer who did all of the physics in Insomniac's Resistance: Fall Of Man. On the other hand, I believe I heard that there were 4 or 5 for Doom 3.

4. To elaborate on Van Gogh's Self Portrait, and to defend my slight feeling of contempt for modern/modern expressionist art and their correlaries.... it employs a vibrant use of many colors in a way that would be difficult to concieve of for anyone not well versed in using color(the eyes have around 40 colors in them, I hear), it shows proper form/proportion, and uses not only variation on light, but variation in color to give a sense of depth and life.

5. I hope to get the opportunity to do some graphics or at least be involved with art direction at some point, so I am in no way saying that art is not important.

Eye-Candy

2008-02-11T23:58:00.000-08:00

Well, it's nice to know i'm not crazy.... or that I at least share my crazyness with somebody else. While it is true that in the future I want to do art work for video games, I must say that I think video games are going too far with trying to look good. 'What?!' you ask yourself, How could he say something like that? They may look better than before, but they're still not mistakable for reality." Well, it doesn't matter, they've still advanced too much. Now you may wonder whether or not I shoved my head in a microwave recently. Rest assured, this isn't the case.

Now, let us justify my outrageous statement. To be more accurate, I believe video game graphics have advanced too much, too FAST. I'm not saying that they shouldn't advance, but I believe that they have advanced too fast with this last console leap. My reason for believing this is that I have been playing Prince of Persia, The Sand of Time....and you know what? I enjoy it more than Halo 3. I don't care that Halo 3 has real-time bloom effects, when I look at a window in PoP, I get a glare too. I don't care that when you bump into plants they react, the do the same in PoP(granted, not throughout the game, but there is a courtyard area where this is implemented). PoP has a refraction effect on it's water. Whilst it's not nearly as realistic and detailed looking as Halo 3's, I am still well aware that it is water, and it serves it's purpose of looking cool.

I will concede though, that Halo 3's graphics implement much more impressive shaders, higher-resolution textures, and has many more polygons in....everything. But I refuse to concede that this makes it look better. I also refuse to concede that this makes the game itself better or, more importantly, more FUN.

Van Gogh's Self Portrait(possibly my favorite painting EVER) does not depict every single pore in his face, it doesn't try to realistically simulate the lighting conditions of the room he did the painting in. But it is still a beautiful work of art, and an impressive showcase of his skill.

Why then, are "last-gen" graphics considered inferior? Isn't the point of the graphics to help convey what's going on? I don't quite see how it matters that plants bounce back when I hit them, I rarely stop to admire them while i'm being shot at. What do I care that my enemy has thousands of unique ways to die? I just want to know the bastard's DEAD.

There is the argument that graphics help create an immersive environment.... which is true....but nothing breaks that environment's immersive-ness like wondering why the developers couldn't have gotten the level designer to make sure it's easy for me to find my direction again if I get turned around when I look away for one reason or another. Is it because they didn't have time? Well, maybe they would have had more time(and money) if they weren't busy worrying about making sure that the color saturation adjusts when you move from a dark area to a light one, so as to mimic the reaction of a human iris.

Don't try to tell me that the immersion level of old games isn't as good when you go back. Some of them, most definately lose something, or a lot of something. But the ones that were truly well put together in the first place do NOT. I have been playing Fallout on and off lately....while I definately NOTICED that the pre-rendered characters didn't use SSS_Skin shaders, it honestly doesn't break it for me. The world's color scheme is consistent, the style of architecture and character design works well, and it just looks good. By the logic of lo-res graphics not standing the test of time, that means that Pac-Man should be unbearable. On the contrary, I love playing emulations of Pac-Man, there's even an arcade not too far from where I live, PacMan's probably the game I play the most.

I am not saying it's bad that we're massively advancing graphics. But it seems like it's usually just with a "bullet-point purpose", where the only reason they include it is to have something to flaunt. Marketing has convinced average consumers that graphics=awesome, which equals more fun. The problem is, that simply adding more detail doesn't change the fun of the core structure of the game, or whether or not it's art style works well.

Luckily, as I mentioned waaay back in the beginning, I have a supporter. This supporter is none other than Lord British himself! Richard Garriot! In his gamasutra interview
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/3535/interview_richard_garriott_is_.php
he expressed similar opinions to mine, but going further in observing that this happens with the beginning/end of every console cycle. Ok, so he doesn't really say exactly what I just said....but he does seem to follow many of the same ideas, and I agree with him whole-heartedly. The difference is that I percieve this last jump, coupled with gaming's new popularity, could push things in a direction that's not necessarily positive. I mean, many people still refer to PS3/Wii/360 as the "next-gen". Even though it is the current gen now, they seem to feel that they need to perpetuate this concept of more technology being better. I think it's, in great part, a problem with who the games are being sold to though. Most people aren't really aware of whether or not something is fun, just whether or not they want it. I guess it's just a manifestation of our Affluenza, we simply seek more.

I think developers need to all just slow down a little bit, and try to figure out how to push the point of fun, rather than physics/rendering aspect which have no effect on the game. Because that's what video games(IMO) are all about, fun.

[Note.] It's a little late, so I'm not sure if this came across right....or if maybe I worded some things incorrectly, so there's a good chance i'll edit it tomorrow or the day after to make more sense and increase coherency.

The beginning.... of DOOM!

2008-01-29T23:27:00.000-08:00

Well, firstly, welcome to my blog. I plan on relatively regularly updating with my thoughts on the world, life, etc.... but mostly video games. The great majority of these blog posts will center around video games first and foremost, second will probably be updates on my progress learning 3d modeling/animation.

So, it's quite convenient that on this, the day of the first post on my blog, I have stumbled upon a Gamasutra news post that my favorite book will have a video game based on it. This book is Ender's Game. Orson Scott Card has partnered with Chair Entertainment Group to 'create a series of video games based on the "Battle Room"'.
http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=17157
This is something I have long dreamt about. Whilst I had fantasized in said dream that I myself would have the honor to work on a game based on the Battle Room, I am none-the-less absolutely ecstatic about this. Besides, there's still their space combat game to work on...

My two main thoughts are: How will they translate the movement described in the book? As I recall, the participants were described as pushing off of the walls. To do this to get around would involve aiming your character one way, then having to get him to push off in another.... so how will they keep from making the camera have to whip back and forth from looking at where you're going and looking at the action? I can think of how this will be done of course, it doesn't take too much imagination.... but I can't think how they would preserve the ability to perform this unconventional method of locomotion while trying to hit moving targets which are doing the same thing. I suppose they may break it down to some sort of a cover system like Gears of War, where you never really WANT to shoot if you're not pressed behind cover(in this case, "Stars"). Though hopefully they can keep it from getting frustrating trying to navigate from cover to cover in the 3d spaces.

Secondly, and far more minor, is that the founders of Chair worked with Card on Advent Rising, which had somewhat mixed reviews.... some liked it, others didn't appreciate it so much. I just want to know it will be as great as it can be.

A third thought also came to mind.... how will they implement the concept of having body parts frozen? Ender implemented this to sheild one's self using the player's legs....

These thoughts are, of course, assuming that the game will work in a certain way. Primarily, i'm assuming that the game will give the player direct control over an individual player. Perhaps it will be a tactical game where the player takes on the role of the commander.

If you have any thoughts of your own, or have some sort of hypothetical answer to my questions, please comment.