Creature Design - Anba

Overview

This creature, like the Ostrad, was a long and arduous process to finish, and I'm still not satisfied with how it turned out. The idea is that it is a manta ray crossed with a bat, and lives a peaceful life of just eating whatever comes into its mouth, whether its in the air or underwater. The hard part was trying to achieve this behaviour in a single pose.

Anba is from what my files are all named - manta-bat. 

Inspiration

Creatures:

• Manta Ray
• Fruit Bat
• Whale Shark

Considered:

• Axolotl
• Barioth (Fantasy - Monster Hunter Tri)
• Jhen Mohran (Fantasy - Monster Hunter Tri)

Process

This may have been the most tedious creature I designed purely through my own incompetence at figuring out perspective and poses. The actual idea was solid and I was happy with the design, it just required more knowledge of perspective than I could gather in the given time-frame, and for that reason it became irritating and took a while to complete.

Initial sketches. As is clear, a pose was hard to come by, but the design was fairly solid and worked out.

More exploration of the design (bottom left), and searching for a pose. Chosen ones were beginning to be coloured and then discarded as they weren't good poses. The top is wrong anatomically, and the middle didn't give a good sense of scale or behaviour.

Resorting to traditional methods to find a pose.

Final image. Found a sedate, gliding bird pose and used it as reference. It didn't correlate with bat wings, so it still feels off. However, colours and head-shape evolved from being constantly drawn, which was a bonus.

Design Notes:

• Has a wide, whale shark mouth that is constantly open and waiting for prey
• Has no feet
• Spends the majority of its life in the air, gliding on powerful air currents and expending very little energy
• Sleeps in the ocean, using its wings as flippers to get in and out. It has gills hidden under its fur. Some have been known to fully convert to the ocean life and do not go back into the air
• Can grow to a colossal scale as so little energy is used to keep itself afloat
• Surprisingly light, for its size - hollow bones and air sacs keep it buoyant
• Sometimes dies in the air, suddenly, and crashes to the floor. Humans crave the gold and precious gems that make up its carapace-like head.

Reflection

• Definitely need some sort of physical reference for winged creatures. I think, should I do another one, I will create small mock wings out of pipe-cleaners and paper or something similar, to have something to efficiently model and pose. I did end up making a flat paper model but the joints and movements were impossible to mimic properly with the limited resources available at the time.
• Fairly irritating creature due to my own ineptitude with perspective. However, I am much more knowledgeable about the skeleton behind bat wings now.
• Useful to complete to the end, even if it isn't the best result.
• Hopefully I can redo it in the future and see the improvements once I've tried more winged creatures and figured out more tricks to work out positioning.
• Hindered by needing a gliding pose; most bat references were not flat winged, and those that were didn't have the correct body positioning I wanted. A more action-based pose would have been easier to pull off but wouldn't give this creature the correct feel, which was to be gentle and gliding. Constraints of keeping within the page limits affected the pose also.
• Navigator was used again to make sure the silhouette was acceptable, if not the best.