The Inuwar (pronounced Inn-ooo-war) are a sophant species native to Inuwarmah and capable of flight in the high density atmosphere.They are almost twice as tall as a human being with a roughly anthropoid form, yet skeletal with great ribbed barrel chests and wide, multiply jointed wings. Their bodies are lined with black fluffy feathers which seem to function more as a protection against cold than a flight aid. Their heads are angular, eyes wide and recessed into sockets on either side of a roughly cubical skull. A substantial fluted flexible proboscis occupies roughly the position where a nose would sit on a human face and serves the combined anatomical functions of nose and mouth. At the junction of the first and second leading flight bones, they have a leathery "finger" which can grip hard. This folds into the skeleton when not in use and when flying for improved aerodynamics. In conjuction with a pair of claw like feet and the proboscis, the "fingers" provide them with a way of manipulating small objects in a surprisingly adept manner although their dexterity is somewhat limited by the awkward geometry of their folded wings. The Inuwar are semi-nomadic hunter-gatherers, following their food sources. They come back to the same locations after traditional intervals (which are sometimes longer than annual) and they develop them when they are there. Their roosts are towns built to be regularly abandoned and then inhabited again by the same tribe when the local forest is in season. Eating mainly a variety of fruits from the forests of the high table lands, the Inuwar are also capable of digesting animal protein and will sometimes supplement their diet with the smaller creatures that inhabit the tree canopies where they feed. On occasions they will venture to the low lands in search of rarer delicacies in the deep atmosphere. The Inuwar make clothing (although they do not wear it in flight) and simple tools and weapons and they are capable of reasonably sophisticated building projects. They show signs that they may be in the early stages of developing agricultural ideas and they create large scale art works within their roosts. ------------------------------- This is rendered in Vue but the model was made by hacking a DAZ gargoyle skeleton to remove the arms and tail and to add the proboscis which I modeled in hexagon and attempted to put together there. Then some addiitonal boolean and metablob techniques were used to improve the body line after importing into Vue and finally the feathers were added in postwork after rendering. Somewhat of a more complex workflow than I usually follow and I wasn't quite sure how to do it for a long time since the above description preceded the necessary art work. Fairly happy that the image is reasonably close to how I originally envisaged the Inuwar, though....