Torso of a Dancing Faun (Invitation to the Dance)

thingiverse

In its original complete form, this figure would have had a goat tail, still partially visible, pointed ears and small horns characteristic of mythological fauns. Ancient Romans associated fauns with the god Faunus who dwelt in woodlands and fields, and was believed to control the fertility of livestock. The faun is the Roman equivalent of the Greek satyr or god Pan. This remnant of a marble faun may be a Roman copy of an earlier Greek bronze sculpture, part of a group known as "The Invitation to Dance." In this group the faun or satyr is tapping his foot and looking at a nymph who is putting on her sandals. Medium: Sculpture | Marble Size: 26 x 15 3/8 in. (66.04 x 39.05 cm) Creation Place: Europe, Italy/Greece, Roman Culture: Graeco-Roman, Europe, Italy/Greece Style: 1st century Physical Description: after a Hellenistic Greek bronze Credit: Collection Minneapolis Institute of Arts; The Putnam Dana McMillan Fund Accession Number: 70.39 Artist: Artist Unknown (Graeco-Roman), Life Dates Unknown Role: Artist Nationality: Nationality Unknown Provenance: Provenance Unavailable Life Dates: Life Dates Unknown Instructions I used the 'Aperture' setting on my Nikon D3100, set to RAW and used a tripod to steady it for the sharpest photos. Overall, I took around 170 overlapping photos from as many angles as possible. Luckily, this sculpture was displayed in a temporary gallery that gave me more room to work around it. I then imported all the RAW photos into Adobe Lightroom and checked them to make sure they were evenly exposed for light, shadow, etc. I had to make a few tweaks and adjustments for darker shadows or blown-out highlights but nothing too extreme. I finally weeded out any photos that were not good enough to use (mainly due to a slight blur for parts of the torso that were more distant from where the camera had been positioned). I then took the remainder that were good enough to work with, double checked them and exported them as 8-bit TIFs (instead of 16-bit, as my Macbook Pro was burning up under the workload of working with dozens of 80MB+ photos). At first I tried just importing the photos directly into Agisoft Photoscan without masking them as I was feeling a little tired and lazy. The resulting model was mostly ok, but it did have enough digital noise and background cloud crud that it made me realize that it would be easier to just mask the photos and try again. After masking the TIFs in Photoscissors for Mac (I'm too dense to figure out Photoshop at this point) I exported the masks as PNG files. I then imported the TIFs & PNGs and stepped back while Photoscan worked its magic. About four or five hours later, I had a good 3D model of the torso of the Dancing Faun to share here. I did import it into Meshlab to decimate the model, then I took the resulting decimated model and closed all the holes in it with Meshmixer. I can see some flaws with the model in a few spots, but I think only eagle-eyed people who know the sculpture well will spot them. I haven't tried running it through a printer yet since I don't have access to one but my only recommendation would be to possibly add a small plinth or base under the legs for the torso to stand on.