Plate 01 — Specimen

No model files

There is no .glb in this project and no texture on disk. The body is one silhouette revolved on a lathe, the bill is a cross-section swept along a drooping spine, and the rest is a handful of spheres and a leaning cone — solved from twelve control points and assembled the moment the page loads.

Drag to turn it. Click to squeeze it.

Plate 02 — Geometry

Twelve points make a duck

The body is a single silhouette revolved around the Y axis. The bill is the one part that is properly modelled — its shell thins toward the tip, its top carries a dome and its underside stays flat, and the hard edge where they meet is the mouth line. Take the specimen apart to see the pieces.

Pull the slider to separate the parts.

Plate 03 — Surface

Clearcoat does the work

A rubber duck reads as rubber because of one thin glossy layer sitting over a soft diffuse base. Take the clearcoat away and the same geometry turns into painted plaster.

Move the sliders. The material rebuilds on the same frame.

Plate 04 — Water

It floats on the maths

One height field, written once. The vertex shader displaces the surface with it, and the CPU samples the identical function to set the duck’s height and read the slope under its hull — so the duck rides the crest the shader actually drew.

Click the water to drop a ripple.

Plate 05 — Swarm

Now do it a few thousand times

The six parts are merged into one geometry with the colours baked into its vertices. That makes the whole flock a single draw call, no matter how many ducks are in it. Positions ease toward the formation you pick.

Pick a formation.

Plate 06 — Colophon

Built in one pass

This page — the geometry, the shaders, the layout and these words — was designed and written by Claude Opus 5 inside The Duck Dose repository. The numbers in the corner are read from the renderer on your machine, not typed in by hand.