Josh Burton - Looking for Remote Opportunities

(New reel focused on animation-specific work, built from recent feedback) Looking for New Remote Opportunities – Full-Time or Contract

I just published Dragonling — Go to Sleep little Dragon medium.com/p/dragonling-g…

Dragonling - Sleep Sprint Update - Anims - Perch sleep enter/out, fly lean, split yawn from sleepy flight, fixed compression - Shoots weak fireballs now when tired, they cost energy - Arm perch toss improvements - Flight body/head tracking improvements - Design - refuses some orders when exhausted, refined other behavior splits Medium post soon.

@Meta - do you really need to update a Quest 3S headset more than 5 times a day? As a dev, it breaks iteration flow and the hand sets stop rendering correctly when it needs an update. Maybe there's a good reason for it but it's hard to guess.

Dragonling | Perch Sleep Enter/Exit Spline pass Quick passes on those two block ins. Back in engine tomorrow.

Dragonling - Sleep Sprint Been busy for a couple weeks with freelance and other stuff. Glad to be back with Dragon for a bit. - This sprint is focused on getting sleep fully ready - Blocking for sleep enter and exit from perch - Split my yawn from the base flying sleepy cycle

I just published Dragonling — Fire and Food medium.com/p/dragonling-f…

Dragonling | Feeding Been busy but closed out my Fire and Food sprint. Working on a medium post. - Multiple ways to feed - hand, toss, throw, more - New IK setup to track the spine/head to food and better track when air tracking - Face override layer setup that increased range of expression over same animations (no head, mouth open blend as it gets closer to food, more) - Some major refactors improving systems (focus, movement) Next up is sprinting sleep to alpha readiness.

Dragonling - Fire Improvements Juggling some freelance this week but making some progress. - Fire animation hooked up - Ended up with a two mask (additive) setup until I can do more fire animations (will do perch, sitting, etc) but the neck up mask works. - Refactored target tracking and worked through some more hiccups

I just published Dragonling — Back in Engine medium.com/p/dragonling-b…

I just published Dragonling — Back To Animation medium.com/p/dragonling-b…

I just published cgmUpdates — Winter Update 1 — 2026 medium.com/p/cgmupdates-w…

Dragonling - Better Batch Export Workflow Note: Scene is our pipeline tool I’ve been using/contributing to for almost 10 years. It’s grown a lot over that time, though there are still edges to refine. I realized I didn’t have a clean way to update my export list. The export list is JSON data that tracks a group of files I want to batch export. We already support updating a rig in a scene. Given a selected master, it checks the reference, looks for a newer iterator version, and updates if one exists. I wanted a similar button to update the batch list. A quick chat with Cursor, pointing it at a few relevant pieces, and it was straightforward: one planning pass, one style pass, done. Time to get our new stuff in engine.

Dragonling - Wake up sleepyhead Blocking and decent spline pass - Wanted to get a shake off in - Speed comes from blocking, best to not move from blocking until you're happy I think that wraps up the set for the sprint, I'll check later. Eager to get the new stuff in engine.

Dragonling - Ground Sleeping Don't wake the dragon. Yet. - Ground is pretty similar to the perch sleep - Wanted to do another yawn - Have the exit blocked in and will hit tomorrow

Rigging Thoughts - Pivots! Space pivots are something I started building into rigs about 15 years ago with my original Morpheus rig. The idea is to add extra constrainable spaces, usually on IK controls, when I want more flexible pivot behavior during animation. On this dragon, for example, I wanted to rotate the foot from the heel. Since the rear foot is digigrade, the primary pivot is set on the pad. A space pivot gives me an additional transform point so I can rotate from whatever position and orientation I need, switching on the fly through my space system. Any solid space switcher can support the same workflow. Sometimes these pivots become their own animator-facing controls, like on the sword character. There, it lets me rotate the wrist around the center of the handle instead of fighting offsets. Here just added the other spaces as options in the dynamic parent setup. They’ve proven consistently useful across a lot of scenarios: - Pivoting from the base of a staff, like Urdim in Poker Night at Discord (my rig, anim by me and my buddy Brian Raschko, Property of Discord) - Animating cards on a table with precise rotation points or along custom paths - Creating temporary contact pivots against the ground or another character If you haven’t experimented with space pivots, they’re well worth adding to your toolkit.

Dragonling - Perch Idle Simple one to start of the week. - Been noodling some horn variants, not sure if we'll go that direction or not - Tried using the chest direct control to put a simple breathe cycle on, kinda like it will probably incorporate to the rest on my next pass - The upper jaw scale works as a squash for the upper face, I'll probably use that more as well - Moving to sleeps next

Dragonling - Perch Land/Takeoff - Iterated on the base pose a bit - Added a bit more life to what I had — little rear wiggle to push through the tail with my filter setup - Gave both another half second or so

Dragonling - Tossed This will drive the grab toss and heavier impact beats. Right now it’s broken into toss_enter, toss_cycle, and toss_recover. - Improved the recover so it read much cleaner than the previous version - Likely separating the toss cycle into a standalone animation to dial in perfect loops Just have perch and sleeps left from initial set to go for this sprint.