Phineas the Jokaero - Warhammer 40k

Meet Phineas the Jokaero! He is part of an intelligent alien species from the Warhammer 40k universe, whom resemble orangutans.

He was originally meant to be a companion character as part of a much larger Warhammer-based Starfield mod which unfortunately never came to fruition due to various factors. He has been sitting on my hard drive for almost 2 years, just begging to be finished off and put to some sort of use so I finally decided now is that time.

I came up with the concept based off of various real-life orangutans and sculpts as well as a combination of various Jokaero concept, and very much a feel and free-ball for what I felt would be right for his character. Being a companion that was meant to aid the character, he needed to be agile and strong while still keeping the aesthetic of an orangutan and Jokaero so I opted to have him be leaner and have more exaggerated musculature than normal. Jokaero are also not known for speech, this needed to be circumvented in some way so I introduced a voice modulator that would have been installed in order to aid him with speech.

Due to the use originally being as part of a larger mod framework, his hair was originally created using hair cards as the Creation Engine 2 is not capable of spline-based hair, however as he is no longer a mod companion I decided to create spline-based hair for use in Unreal Engine which I personally prefer. I have included renders of the hair cards as well for comparison, but they are no longer the primary hair.

I sculpted initially with Zbrush, retoplogized and created UVs with Blender, baked maps with Marmoset Toolbag, Textured with Substance Painter, created hair splines with XGEN, and rendered the final in Unreal Engine 5. All in all, this character took me about 2 months initially to get to the "hair card" phase, plus the additional 2 or so weeks I spent recently creating new hair and finalizing rigging, and rendering.

I hope you like him :)