Bat Modelling - pt. 1

My first character in the fable is a bat, so this will be the model i will start with.

I started off by researching some good images of a bat to craft with and found a suitable 'morphology' view of a bat that I have chosen to base my model on. this is a particularly good reference image as it shows all body parts and how the wings work. To begin, I created a simple plane with dimentions matching that of the reference image and applied the image as a material using the material editor and assigning a bitmap image.

I have become quite proficient and comfortable starting off with 'planes' to model my pieces, therefore I will be using the same technique here for the bat. The image demonstartes the first stage of the 'plane-modelling', where the body is covered with a plane that has been set as 'see-through' under the object properties settings. This allows me to carefully edit and mold the plane to get the desired shape to work with.

I covered half of the bat's body with the plane, then applied a symmetry modifier to get the exact same shape on the other side - as the image shows, this allows a nice, neat finished plane covering the bat's body.

After the plane has been shaped to fit the bat's body, I continued to expand the plane by selecting relevant edges and cloning the selection, to create a new section which covers the next area. As you can see in the image above, the plane has been extended and shaped to cover one of the bats arms.



Once the entire arm of the bat was finished using the edge / clone expansion technique. I did the exact same for the bat's lower leg and feet. The next stage of this modelling process will be to clean up any edges that are not aligned or shaped properly and finally add another symmetry modifier to mirror the plane on the other side to save time and get a good, simple base-outline to work with.