Graduating

Well under much worry and anticipation I went in for my final review and despite my fears actually did well. I never used to think of myself as a modeler but the more I do it, that satisfaction of seeing an idea that you have drawn for years suddenly look like a physical, tangible creature just gets more addictive. These are still technically a WIP, and I look forward to taking the character model into Max and really adding some nice lighting and textures and backgrounds along with using the transpose modifier to pose him into a more natural stance.
The telescope I got a lot of help on the texturing, but I was off to a good start. The modeling is all me, and it was tedious yet somehow addictive and therapeutic to do. 

My site still needs work, it was incredibly frustrating and the source of pretty much all of my stress that night before the review, I just couldn't work fast enough to get every feature working and the huge amount of images didn't help, but the despite the site issues it didn't make me look any worse than anyone else, it was just typical student errors. I was so relieved after the review, and incredibly exhausted, I felt kind of bad leaving before everyone else was done but I was just so tired from the night before plus driving in 100+ degree heat without AC just drains you. Here are the projects as they are, and my site is still under construction so please forgive the inactive links and oversized images:
jordan-burke.com

Recent Things

Thought I would upload some of my recent stuff while I fumble around with my portfolio site in Dreamweaver ( I dont know any code).  At school I had to change my track or "major" as they say at normal colleges. I am now in modeling/previsualization which is awesome because previs is the hardest track to get into and I tried earlier and failed to get in. Funny that on my very last term I make it in, just by showing my sketchbook to the instructors. 

So basically I could have majored in my own damn sketchbook this whole time instead of animating in Maya which my heart was not entirely into.
Some of these sketches are just more presentable versions of older ones.

Sketch Studies

I did a few studies in areas I felt weak in. I want to do more environment studies along with strengthen how I draw heads as I sometimes struggle with different angles of the head. I have George Bridgeman's "Drawing From Life" which is an enormously great reference on how to do this. He breaks down his anatomy in a way that is so easy to understand!

Warm ups

Some warm-ups I did to get into the drawing mood.

Drawings done over the break

Drawings I did over the break so far! I got a few great books for christmas and ordered two more with an Amazon gift card. I ordered "Andrew Loomis: Successful Drawing" and "The Techniques of Scott Robertson" as I have always wanted to design and draw spacecraft. The other books I got were "Inked", "Character Mentor" and "Blast."

3d Production

My primary focus in 3d character animation and for this piece I have two characters in a classroom with one attempting to cheat off the other in ridiculous ways, this  The animatic I did months prior to me actually starting on the work and had a lot of changes done to it. For the characters I used Josh Burton's Morpheus rig which are very easy to modify to look like my characters. The only issue I am currently stuck on is how I don't know how to add my own clothing to the mesh.

The set I did in 3ds max and Maya. It started as a free model but the model required heavy work, also, the set needed to match the style of the characters I originally drew. The set and textures will be imported into maya before animating and modified using the lattice modifier in Maya.

2d Production

In addition to the 3d animation piece I need for for my portfolio, I decided to take on the task of also doing a 2d piece. Thanks to my internship I have become very familiar with the program Toon Boom Harmony and I wanted to use that advantage to advance my portfolio.

The story for this piece is about a little girl who goes to the zoo to see a gorilla who is quite irritable, and in his failed attempts to scare the girl away he gets his head stuck in the bars of his cage, after which the girl cakes his face in makeup. The initial plan to to have a clean rough animation but I would also love to have a colored version in addition to the rough, but the performance is the main thing I want to nail.

Here I have the animatic, and below is the finished set. It took a few iterations to get the set working well, I tend to stylized my backgrounds and because of that I had a fish eye effect going on. I also had to keep the backgrounds simple so the characters had room to perform, I really look forward to animating this!