Creature Artist Shares His Process For Creating Realistic Bat
Sandro Hofbauer offered a closer look at the texturing, shading, and simulation workflows.
For the past few months, Creature Artist Sandro Hofbauer has been working on this cute brown long-eared bat, continuously refining the creature while sharing detailed progress. For this project, he used ZBrush for sculpting, Mari for texturing, Houdini for grooming, and Arnold in Solaris for rendering.
Take a look at these close-up renders of the bat's face and ears, two of the creature's most important features:
Sandro Hofbauer
Sandro Hofbauer
Sandro Hofbauer
"In Mari, I worked with a material-based system. The only two maps I created directly were the micro displacement and the albedo. Everything else was handled in shading using a large amount of isolation masks. I felt that a bat is a very complex creature to shade, especially because of the membrane and veins, so I wanted to give the shading as much flexibility as possible instead of baking everything into textures before rendering."
Below is a layer breakdown of the skeleton, skin, and hair. The artist created the skeleton as part of his skeleton-muscle-skin ZBrush workflow and for rigging purposes. It's fully retopologized and UV unwrapped.
Sandro Hofbauer
Sandro Hofbauer
Sandro Hofbauer
In this video, the first clip shows Sandro's Vellum simulation setup in Houdini for the wing membrane. He created a simplified proxy mesh for the simulation, using a single-sided surface. After running the simulation, he used Point Deform to transfer the result onto the final geometry and created masks for the rest of the body.
The second part shows the tension map setup, reportedly inspired by Rob Au. "The principle behind the setup is based on taking curves and measuring them in a neutral pose, then generating attributes during animation depending on whether the lines stretch or compress. The curves were placed from the left wing to the right wing to create the correct tension effect when the wings open," explained Sandro.
"In the last two pictures, you can see how the displacement maps change. The first image shows the displacement before the tension effect is applied, while the second shows the result after stretching is introduced, creating smoother wrinkles in stretched areas and sharper, more compressed wrinkles in others."
Below is an update of the bat's flight cycle, with animation by Niclas Hertzig. Sandro compared the previous render with the new version:
Finally, at the top of the page is the bat's shading turntable. Sandro also included a comparison with one of the earlier turntables, noting that most of the improvements were focused on the ears and hair shading.
He is almost finished with the project and breakdowns, which he plans to submit as an entry for The Rookies. Stay tuned and follow him on LinkedIn.
Subscribe to our Newsletter, join our 80 Level Talent platform, follow us on Twitter, LinkedIn, Telegram, and Instagram, where we share breakdowns, the latest news, awesome artworks, and more.
Are you a fan of what we do here at 80 Level? Then make sure to set us as a Preferred Source on Google to see more of our content in your feed.
