Melanie Estes: Week 1 Duck

View 1

     For my rubber duck I wanted to make a pool float that looks like a duck. I based the coloring of the float off of this image of baby ducklings. I also referenced this image of a parrot float and this image of a duckling on a goose float. I made the kiddie pool and noodle to go along with the duck for context.

Ghosted painted black

Layer assignments

     I created the head using the method from the tutorial. I used projected curves to split the head to allow different color assignments. The wings are made of shrunken ellipses, and the tail is made of three combined ellipses. The body of the float is a torus. I connected the head and wings by trimming circles out of the surfaces and using the blend surfaces tool. I created the seams by drawing the profile of the head and neck with curves, planar the curve, and extrude the surface into a thin piece. I combined it using boolean union. I did the same for the other seams, but was able to use the circle curve and elliptical curve drawing tools. The kiddie pool is made of three toruses. I made the water by created a plane, using the rebuild tool to add more points, and dragging individual points either up or down to simulate calm water. I then extruded this surface to fill the pool. The noodle is made of a cylinder, with the middle hole cut out using boolean difference, and the edges fileted. I used cage edit to gently curve it to sit in the water.

View 2

     The duck itself is colored using the same soft shiny plastic but in five different colors. The rest of the settings are identical so the piece looks whole. I used a clear plastic for the water, with a dark blue diffuse color and a lighter blue for specular color. I added a fractal noise bump map to help add to the illusion of moving water. I used a mold-tech for the noodle; I scaled the texture map down so the bumps imitated foam. I also used a soft shiny plastic for the pool, but used this image for the color map. The color is mapped on with the cylindrical setting and scaled down significantly. 

View 3