Chelsea Griffin - Week 2 - Duck

Concept

This is Steve. My initial idea was to create a swan as opposed to a duck.  As you can see, I kind of got carried away. While making the swan, the feathers on the wings became a little too complex to execute for me and my newbie modeling skills. I had the body of the swan completed and I was pretty proud of it so I came to the conclusion that I would have to mutate the poor thing. I came up with the idea of bat wings, as those are significantly simpler than birds wings. After that, I decided that this monstrosity needed to have some pretty unique limbs as well, and that's how I came up with the idea for his tentacles. I came to the decision of the three eyes and head spikes in a similar manner. While being created in Rhino, Steve was mainly green and purple, sort of like a dragon. But once I brought him into Keyshot, nothing really seemed to look right in these colors. I began messing with metallics and came to find that Steve actually makes a pretty gnarly robot. And thus, Steve the mutant robot kaiju was born.    

Modeling Techniques 

Although Steve was a bit different from the original duck example, I tried to use most of the techniques that were used in the duck tutorial. For example, for the wings and the head, I used the project tool as well as blend surface to make the body parts blend naturally. I used the project tool for the tentacles as well. The eyes were also oriented on the surface, just like in the duck tutorial. I utilized the mirror tool for the wings as well as the tentacles. The most useful of all in creating Steve was creating the neck, wings, and tentacles using the curve and the pipe tool. 

Materials Used

As I had mentioned before, the final materials I chose for Steve were not what I had originally intended. When messing around with Keyshot, I came to find that scratched metal was perfect for him. I used the infrared gradient material for his eyes to complete the robot look. As for the tentacles, I still wanted that part of him to be natural and organic, to emphasize the fact that he is a mutant. Creepily, I found that the best effect for this was using the human skin texture, which I darkened quite a bit to look a little less human.