My sister sent me a video from a company selling duck-shaped keycaps. The entire keyboard was ducks. No legends, just pure, unadulterated rubber ducky. But the thing was, $10 is a lot for such a basic keycap. I decided to create my own, and with the help of my 3D printer, I was able to fill my keyboard with ducks from the comfort of my own home in hours for less than the cost of one commercial keycap.

The journey was not easy. After finding only one suitable model online, I realized I needed to get my hands dirty in the world of 3D modeling. The keycap model I based my original prototype off of was good, but the final version needed to be re-created from the ground up.

The issues stemmed from the stem— it was too narrow for my printer to reliably print. Also, the outermost dimensions of the duck far exceeded the keycap’s margin of personal space, meaning the head would collide with the tails of ducks in adjacent rows and the wings would slide against adjacent ducks in the same row. While this might be suitable for an artisan keycap that’s only on the escape key, it simply won’t do for my purposes.

I started by closely examining this design of a duck keycap with a crown. It was quite fat for a keycap and had a crown, which were both going to be problems if I wanted to “remix” or create a derivative work of this model. No design files were provided, so editing would be difficult. Furthermore, the model’s license prohibits derivatives. So, I had to create my own model from scratch. I started in Meshmixer, noting the internal dimensions and shape of the existing keycap. I roughed out the stem part in Plasticity, brought it back into Meshmixer for sizing, and then took it into Nomad sculpt on my iPad to create the actual duck. Back into Meshmixer on the computer to fix non-manifold geometry and reduce the polygon count, and it was done.

The final keycaps were marvelous, five versions later. “Both a masterpiece in terms of design and practicality…” said no one. Regardless, here they stand in all of their glory.

Download your own escape key on MakerWorld to print with your multicolor Bambu Lab machine. It’s also available on Printables, with the option of supporting me for the slimmed version in case you also wanted a full keyboard of ducks.