Jeremiah Baker - Week 1 Duck

ghosted painted black

ghosted with material assignments

render 01

render 02

Concept:
I decided to create a mallard duck for this project. I added wings, legs, and feet to add some detail to the model. I thought it would be boring for it to just be sitting there, so I also created some water for it to be swimming in and posed it so it looks like it's swimming.

Modeling Techniques:
I made use of control points for most of the molding for the main body, the head, and the feet. All of these objects started as spheres, which I warped into shape. I used a curve, project, and split to separate the head from the bill. For the wings, I just duplicated the body and changed the scale until I had something that loosely resembled wings. The eyes were created with two overlapping spheres, which were put on the head using orient-on-surface. The legs are just cylinders. The water was a bit more of a challenge. I created 4 curves and used the surface-from-curves tool (similar to loft) to generate the surface. Then I just extruded the surface to add some depth. I had some trouble rendering the water (which takes forever, btw), so I also created a ground layer under the water to help with surface reflection.

Materials:
I used a leather texture for the body and head of the duck to give a skin-kind of texture. The bill, feet, and eyes were textured with varying levels of glossy plastic. The water is texture with a water texture (shocking, isn't it?), and the ground is a rough sand texture.