“The Fauno and the Souls of the Night”
The sorrowful fauno awoke from a long, painful lethargy. He had slept for centuries, or at least, he had remained motionless since the night the fireflies vanished. Without them, the fauno found no meaning in the forest; his sadness cast him onto a mossy bed. Without the will to move and unable to sleep, he lay there, a monument to desolation.
One of those long, unending nights, with eyes half-closed from exhaustion, he glimpsed a tiny glow in the distance. He attributed it to a bad dream, a mirage created by his own sorrow. Disbelief and apathy mixed, and the fauno turned away.
But then, he perceived another light. And then another, and another, until the darkness began to flicker like a heart coming back to life.
The fauno reacted. He jolted upright, a tremor of astonishment running through his body. He grabbed his lantern and ventured into the woods. Stunned, he found himself surrounded by tiny lights dancing through the vegetation.
The fireflies had returned after centuries of absence.
In that light, the fauno found more than insects; he found the omen of life. His hope returned, his joy returned, he was back on his path. His long lethargy was over, and the magical world awaited him, illuminated once more.
when was a child and a young man, on my travels to the jungle and higjlands in my country i used to see uncontable fireflies and these last years I went back to the same places, there are not fireflies anymore, lot of things the human race is killing, those tiny light in darkeness are one of them.
For this personal project I combined two tools for the hair, Xgen for the body and Ahoge for the facial hair including the braids, eyebrows, eyelids, some shoulders hair, underarm and the feathers, this is a really easy tool to work with, I sculpted the fulls character in Zbrush, textures in Substance painter and shader in Maya and render with Arnold