Bringing to life one of the most iconic paintings by the Canarian artist Néstor Martín-Fernández de la Torre.
Sátiro del Valle de Hespérides (Satyr of the Valley of the Hesperides) is the name of the artwork that immediately caught my eye and made me fall in love with it when I first saw it at an exhibition here in Tenerife. Inspired by it, I decided to recreate this fascinating character in 3D, eventually including it in the final project of the Master’s Degree I am currently completing.
Using an artwork like this as a reference comes with a variety of challenges I had to overcome, starting with the horn that extends across his face, occluding part of it and forcing me to reinterpret the facial features. And of course, since I’m modeling a fully functional character prepared for animation, I also had to imagine how the lower part of the body should look.
Anatomy is an important part of this project. I started with a sculpt of the general form, which I used as the base for the retopology, and then worked on the details and individual muscles using subdivision levels inside ZBrush. During that process, I had to go back and fix the topology. As shown in the pictures below, I didn’t take into account the shape of the neck muscles in the low‑poly model, and that caused issues when I wanted to reshape those areas.
Part of achieving a realistic look comes from building solid anatomy, but also from the texture work I’m currently developing. I’m also creating the hair using X‑Gen and have started experimenting with blendshapes with the intention of building a simple facial rig.
