TITLE: Moby Duck
NAME: Michael Scholz
COUNTRY: Germany
EMAIL: info@michaelscholz.de
WEBPAGE: http://www.michaelscholz.de
TOPIC: High Seas
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: mobyduck.jpg
ZIPFILE: mobyduck.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    3DStudioMax3.1

TOOLS USED: 
    Photoshop5.5 for texture preparation and jpg-file

RENDER TIME: 
    33 minutes

HARDWARE USED: 
    Dual PII400, 256MB Ram


IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 


A comic book cover: Captain "Playmobil" Ahab will finally
face his enemy, Moby Duck, the wrath of all bubble baths.



DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


Idea

Pondering on the topic I initially thought of pirates and
adventures on the high seas. And then "Moby Dick" came to
mind, the famous high-seas-adventure masterpiece novel by
Herman Melville. I wanted to do an adaptation of this but
soon realized that modeling a realistic ship with captain
on board and a whale in a storm torn sea was out of reach
for me - I needed a different approach that better suited
my skills. And then came the idea of a bathtub adventure!

Concept

Moby Duck is modeled after a rubber ducky I have at home,
actually it is the Ernie one from Sesame Street. And Ahab
is adapted from a Playmobil figure which are popular toys
among kids in Germany. There is a toy pirate series which
I used as inspiration. My original imageconcept was to do
a duel situation image, a face off between Ahab and Moby.
But after modeling the two I became aware that in such an
image one of the two would only be seen from the back. So
the idea of a cover design came, and all face the camera!

Modelling

Captain Ahab and Moby Duck are both modeled out of simple
boxes which where tweaked and pulled and turned and mesh-
smoothed in the end to make them rounded. For the cut out
part of Ahab's lower body I used boolean subtraction, his
hat is nurbs. The soapbubbles are coloured, opacitymapped
"face" particles, the foam's four simply textured planes. 

Texturing

You will find the bubble map in the zip-file. The rest is
nothing much: a glossy plastic material for Ahab and very
little, tiny noise as bumpmap. Same for the Duck but less
glossy. The foam has a procedural cellular map as opacity
and finally some noisemap on the water as soap texturing.
I nearly forgot: I scanned a barcode and used it as such,
and I designed a comic layout in Photoshop to serve as my
background, along with the duckmouth and Ahab's clothing.

Lighting

I have a spot in the exact location and aim as the camera
and a two, three sidelights to brighten up the situation.

Final notes

This image is not a composite - it came straight from the
renderer as you see it. The barcode, A-Bathtub-Adventure-
and author-text where modeled/textured and placed between
camera and the rest in a way to make it appear as layout.
Thank you for reading this far. Just in case you would be
curious to know: the lovely face in the circle belongs to
my girlfriend, who was very patient with me while I spent
many long hours infront of the computer doing this image.