Looks great! What program are you using?

Ah, I keep forgetting to mention that. I modeled and rendered this in Lightwave 3D.

Ah. You might want to make the "Arm" section of the wings bulge a little more, it dosn't seem to have much muscle.

You're right, with the wing skin in place the fore-arm does seem a little under developed.

Thanks for the feedback.

Nicely done, especially the wings.

Thanks. I did put a lot of thought into the wings, and details-wise, they are more detailed than any other area of the model with the exception of the head. This does have me facing a problem though, as the torso and feet have very little detail. The easiest way to add detail would be to do a metaform sub-divide (basically, it cuts every sub-patch two ways), but that would quadruple my already high polygon count and add additional detail to the wings as well, which I don't really need. (I don't mind adding detail to the face as I was planning to add detail there from the beginning). I may have to backstep a bit, I don't know yet, but I am considering my options. In the meantime, I am working on rigging it. The rigging can be adapted if I do make any changes, so there is no fear in doing that.

How many polys are you speaking about when you say 'high polycount'?

You could always make him higher-poly, model out what you want and then use a displacement mapping on the low poly version. (I don't know for certain, but LW should be able to do dispmapping?) Should be no problem because there's no fur to goof it all up ^^

For now he has 17k polygons after the subpatches are converted to polygons. Subdividing would give 4 times that number. Of course, I could sub-divide then reduce the subpatch level to reduce the number of polygons in the final render. I do want to use a bump map for some of the detail to reduce the need for a ridiculous polygon count, but some detail just has to be added in the actual model.

Have you looked into displacement mapping?
It actually displaces and modifies the mesh at render time, instead of a bumpmap's limited bump depth. It might just be what you need, without cranking polycounts up into the 100k's. The workflow would be like: export low poly to zBrush (for example), subdivide the model 3 or 4 times (million poly) model in everything you need, and then export the difference between the two as displacement map. I've seen results where the low poly model became practically indistinguishable from the million-poly version. Also animates much faster. IM me if you have questions :)

Sure, I've used displacement maps before, but Lightwave can only displace actual geometry as far as I know. I don't think that it can displace the points generated on a subpatch model. Strike that, I just looked in Lightwave, as long as I set the subdivide to occur *before* the displacement, then it should work fine. I'll look into that, thanks for the tip.

well I see you're going for a more practical design, With a wingspan thats this big and having it replace the arms as opposed to being stuck onto it's back,
Just a hint, I makes animation a million times easier, if you have the wing themselves as seporate models.

Yeah, I wanted to make something that might actually evolve in the real world.

The *skin* of the wings is a separate object. That's the part that I want to use a dynamics system to animate. The rest I can use skeletons and bone weight maps to animate. Done it before for a rat model a couple years back. Takes a bit of time in set-up, but not that hard, and you get really good control without visible seams between objects.

I hope to have it rigged and a test posted by the start of January, but I can't make any promises.

Woah, look at the size of those wings! Hmmm, they look cool and realistic and I like the fact that they resemble bat's wings. =)