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Description
This was a first for rigging and animating my own model from scratch. I'm quite pleased by how the primary and secondary motions came out, especially for a first pass. My lesson from working on this: Fix clipping issues before animating -- I used two thin meshes for the wings and they clipped bad enough I ended up mangling the model for the render to come out clean.

One other interesting finding from researching refs: I didn't actually find any bat refs of a forward stroke wing beat. I'm sure they switch to a forward stroke when flying at high speed but I never actually saw video of that happening. I speculate that's because most video of bats shows them maneuvering around stuff rather than flying towards something, which causes them to use a backstroke so they can vector their wings in a downward motion more easily. I'm still very curious if they make the switch when flying at speed. I modeled this one after a magpie in a wind tunnel, to get that more recognizable forward stroke.

Blend File

Refs:
Magpie in a wind tunnel (Youtube)
Brown University Bat Flight Modeling (Flash Player or Download)

Description
This was a first for rigging and animating my own model from scratch. I'm quite pleased by how the primary and secondary motions came out, especially for a first pass. My lesson from working on this: Fix clipping issues before animating -- I used two thin meshes for the wings and they clipped bad enough I ended up mangling the model for the render to come out clean.

One other interesting finding from researching refs: I didn't actually find any bat refs of a forward stroke wing beat. I'm sure they switch to a forward stroke when flying at high speed but I never actually saw video of that happening. I speculate that's because most video of bats shows them maneuvering around stuff rather than flying towards something, which causes them to use a backstroke so they can vector their wings in a downward motion more easily. I'm still very curious if they make the switch when flying at speed. I modeled this one after a magpie in a wind tunnel, to get that more recognizable forward stroke.

Blend File

Refs:
Magpie in a wind tunnel (Youtube)
Brown University Bat Flight Modeling (Flash Player or Download)