I know it's not even close to correct right now. The head needs to be flattened, the snout needs to be elongated and there are no teeth, but this is less than a half hour of honest effort. Poser started acting up on me because I was rendering a high poly model the size of a 12 man tent, so I was only able to get 2 views out.

I give you Man-bat. I am wondering if anyone would be interested in collaberating on this model once I get it done. I don't know a thing about rigging, and I want to do the textures justice. I also want to put him in the freebies section. Give me a holler if you are interested.

He he. Cool

Nice Manbat, Rokket!

Sorry can't, currently, say I'd be much hat at either texturing, or rigging... but I hope someone who is steps up... because a Manbat freebie would be awesome!

Thank you! I have looked in a few different places to see if there was one already out. Mostly I was finding the action figures and some drawings, but no Poser ready model. I will see this through to the end. The body will be hard, but I feel I am up to it. Yeah, I hope someone can step up, or I will be trying to rig him myself, and that won't be pretty or ready before Poser 12 comes out....

Ha ha... well... you never know, I may be up to speed by then too

Grrrr... I went a little nuts and now I have to decimate the mesh before I continue. Got the poly count on just the head over 150,000 :ohmy:

Going to take it into MeshLab and see what I can do....

Meshlab did the trick, but I got in a hurry when I was working with him in Wings and saved .obj and closed the program. Somehow I messed up the file and it didn't save anything. Starting over this evening...... (whimper, pout, cry)

If you have access to a retopology tool and a sculpting application it may go faster for you if you sculpt out the design and then retopo it.

You are right about that. I have Meshlab and I have been doing that as I go along. If I get it too heavy, I retopo and then go back.

Here is a look at the new mesh:

Why take this approach as opposed to making a morph for an existing  figure?

Quote - Why take this approach as opposed to making a morph for an existing  figure?

I don't know how to do any of that. I am learning as I go, and I am lucky to get this far.

Quote - Thank you! I have looked in a few different places to see if there was one already out.

There's a pretty straightforward M3 Manbat knockoff character and a vampire morph by Grotto which frankly looks a world better but doesn't have quite the right type of wing arms if you're being totally loyal to the surface material.

http://www.daz3d.com/shop/man-bat-for-m3/

http://www.renderosity.com/mod/bcs/grottos-vampire-for-michael-3/68828

I am planning to work on this until I get it to look exactly like the action figure in the picture I posted. I do most of this stuff as exercises to improve my lacking skill set, but if this one works, I want to rig it and give it away.

Quote - This is what I am trying to accomplish. I wouldn't know where to begin to make this a character morph. Are there tutorials out there for that? I wouldn't mind learning it, if someone could show me the down and dirty of it...

When I do this kind of thing, one thing I often start out with is looking to see what kinds of models have been made by 3d artists in the more professional 3d community beyond ours and pull inspiration from their work.  Easiest way to do that is to just google the name of the character you're after followed by the magic word "zbrush".

Are you a poser loyalist? Where I'd start creating a character morph is by exporting the head of your favorite figure out of poser and starting to sculpt it in your modeling application of choice.  Paying special attention not to disturb the neck seam or the eyeball sockets. 

Ahhhh, I see.

I am a Poser loyalist, I guess. I have Sculptris, Wings and Meshlab (I don't have money for ZBrush or anything not free), and I am still trying to figure out ALL of the features of them. I may try a morph later on. Right now I am still working on this guy.

I have been on ZBrush Central (I was a member there, same username), but I haven't logged on there in months.

I also noticed a problem with the tip of the ear that I will have to fix.

This is probably about a half hour job morping M4's head in zbrush, which you've already commented that you can't afford.  I don't know whether or not you could do the same in sculptris as that program tends to like turning things into triangles and adding geometry willy nilly.  Still, with this headmorph done,  I think much of the rest of the creature could be accomplished by scaling m4's bodyparts.  Broad chest,  skinny waist, short legs, long arms. You'd then have to texture it.  I don't know that there are many free tools adequate to that task, as having deformed the mesh quite a bit, I'd want to do my texturing directly on the model it to minimize the stretching of the texture.  If I tried to create a texture for this noggin in photoshop, it'd wind up looking warped all to hell on those ears.  Painting directly on the model would minimize that.

In terms of the wings, the closest I've ever come is some classic Spiderman armpit webs (which apparantly I've never made a single render of), and that's a far ways off.  Still, I figured out how to make those by looking at rawarts creature wings, specifically his underarm models, and the way those were rigged.  His underarm wings are really just fairly simple geometry that's been textured and transmapped.  If I were going to try to make underarm batwings, I think I could either take a very similar approach or model something more detailed and still rig them in a similar way.  If I was feeling less ambitious I suppose I could just make a texture and use his underarm figure.  Or, if I really wanted to just get going with it, looking at the products page for the creature wings, it appears they have an addon pack that has underarm batwings, so if I wasn't feeling diy at all, I might just buy that.

As an alternative approach, you might be able to do something dynamic.  This is pure speculation, but I remember a swidhelm dragon that had dynamic membranes on it's wings, and I've seen various dynamic dresses with wing like features.

I made this wing in Wings (there's a joke in there somewhere) in about 10 minutes. It's not perfect, but with some real thought and careful planning, I think I can do a good job on his arm when I get ready to start on the body.