Rubber Duck Blender

Rubber Duck Blender.

It may seem to be a simple image, my rubber duck really is a little more complicated. That is all my fault as I have animated it, I have done this so I can use my ducky for multi-purposes.

Without going to deep in the animation technique as there are enough Blender 3D tutorials on the net, I am showing you what can be done after a lot of reading, experimenting, googling, etc.
It took me a couple of hours to figure our how to animate the eyes without the need of moving the eyes separately and don’t go all cross-eyed.
Basically every eye has it’s own animation bone that has a “Copy rotation” constraint with a bone I places between the two eyes. So both eyes make the same rotation as the middle bone. This bone has a “Damped Track” to the bigger bone, the selected bone on the images. This selected bone is the bone I use to steer the eyes in the direction I like.

Another problem I faced were the eyes that are modelled like cartoon eyes. Normal round eyes are no problem to rotate but oval cartoon eyes look really weird if they are rotated, they pop out of the head. I solved this with a Lattice around the eyes, now the eyes “deform” to the shape of the Lattice. This may not be the best solution but that is what I came up with.

I also did a basic beak animation, my duck needs to show funny faces and has to be able to stick out his tongue 🙂
To nicely deform it’s beak I parented the beak to the armature and used “Weight paint”.

The most work I had with the umbrella is the texture. I did a UV Mapping and exported this to Gimp to do some nice painting of the texture, this is done in about 15 minutes.

This seems like a lot of work for this simple looking image, it is to be honest, but now as I have my little duck animated I can use it with different poses in a quiet easy way.

The final result, click on the image to go to Ducks page:

For similar images take a look here, but don foget to come back to my site:
rubber duck art
rubber duck prints
rubber ducky art
rubber ducky prints