This week we were tasked with making a Zubat.
To start, I brought in a reference image of a Zubat I found online. I scaled this to the size I wanted, rotated it into a T-pose like position and made it unable to select (allowing me to use the orthographic view to build directly on top of the reference, making sure I get it accurate).
Then I got to work on the Zubat’s body. I started with the sphere and sized it to fit the belly of my reference image. I took the top of the sphere and moved it upwards to fit with the length of the body, adding some loops and beveling to adjust the shape to fit my reference (at this stage I knew I wanted my model to be the same on either side, so I cut the body in half and applied a mirror modifier on the X axis). Then I took the knife tool and cut an outline of the mouth shape and removed the faces inside, then I went and added another line around the mouth as I knew I wanted some sort of lip and then tidied up any n-gons into quads.
From this I started to close off the mouth by extruding the edge inwards and scaling inwards too, finishing the final hole by bridging the edge loops. Then I made my lip by extruding the faces and adding a bevel. To give it a smoother texture I added a shade smooth and a subdivision modifier, these made the inner mouth look weird and bumpy with the shading, so I added some loops and readjusted the scaling to fix this issue. To finish I used proportional editing to adjust the mouth shape on the x axis.
With the body completed I went to work on the ears. I selected the faces around the ears and extruded them up to the length on the reference and added a loop, scaling this outward and beveled to create the outer ear shape. Then I extruded the front faces inward to make the curve of the inner ear, I used the smooth tool to relax the verts and adjust the ear with some proportional editing.
Now Zubat needed some legs, similarly to the ears I extruded these from around the bottom of the body, but first I needed to round the area of where I was extruding from so that it wasn’t too blocky. To do this I used the proportional edit tool to adjust the base of the body and then used the vertex slider to add some curvature. Once I was satisfied, I just extruded these faces and scaled the bottom inwards and added a bevel around the foot so it didn’t come to a harsh point. To finish I smoothed the joint between the body and leg.
The above images were actually my second attempt at making this model- the first time I struggled a lot with how the mirror modifier was clipping edges into each other and the shapes weren’t looking how I wanted, so I wanted to try the model from scratch and found it went a lot better, I caught my mistakes earlier on meaning that I could fix them. This was what my model looked like before I redid it and it’s safe to say I’m much happier with my second attempt.
To finish off my Zubat’s body he just needed some teeth. Using a cone, I deleted the bottom face and extruded the edge downwards, I bevelled the middle loop, shaded smooth and then applied a solidly modifier and a subdivision surface modifier to round out the teeth. After scaling to fit the mouth I duplicated it, resized the top tooth, and joined both of these to the main body.
With the main body done it was time to start working on the wings. For these I started with a plane and cut out the ‘skin’ or the purple section using the knife tool. Then I added a solidify modifier to this and added a bit of thickness. Sorting the n-gons I made sure to follow the blue boning in the middle for my next step, which was to select the edges where the blue boning was and duplicate and separate out the line. I converted this into a Bezier curve and started removing the extra verts. I converted the pointed parts of the wing into vector handles and the others into aligned handles and started making my curved wings.
Then I added some depth to it and converted it into a mesh. I adjusted this to fit the skin part of the wing and added some smooth points to the ends of the boning, I shaded this smooth and added a subdivision surface modifier to recreate the reference wings. Then I went and used proportional editing to adjust some of the curvature into the skin of the wings to add some depth to them and once I was satisfied, I joined the skin and boning together and added a mirror modifier to mirror around the body. I moved the origin point to where the wing connects to the body to help with what I wanted the animated movement to look like and made the body the wings parent.
FRONT VIEW
BACK VIEW
The last step before animating was to give it some colour, so I took the colours from my reference and looked online for what the back of the wings looked like and applied materials to match, I had to go back with a knife tool and adjust the verts on the ear to allow me to apply the two tone colour but the rest was simple to apply. Once this model was done, I then decided to duplicate my model and recolour it to make the ‘shiny’ version of the Zubat to animate a friend for him. 
With the models done it was time to animate. The first thing was sorting the wings, to do this I made key frames for one flap of the wings and then added a cycle modifier so that they would continue this action, which made it very easy to animate the rest of the movement by just moving the position and rotating the body. To finish this animation, I added another key frame to the middle of the movement and rotated the body so it looked like it was flying instead of just gliding between positions. Then I added some lighting and a dark blue background to mimic the caves from the game and this was my final result:
Overall I’m very happy with my result, especially with overcoming the many difficulties I faced while making the model.