We have been heartened by the monochrome holograms for many years already, and many of us have seen a permanent exhibition of holograms in Kiev Lavra. Now it's time for full-color holograms to take its place in the world market of art and advertising. The possibilities for development of 3d graphics are boundless. Your attire and ambience on the hologram could be represented as you like. Would you like to look younger, prettier and luxurious? Everything is possible!
In February 2009, Andrey from “4dStudioR” asked me if I could make a CG / 3D portrait of Sheikh Zayed. In the United Arab Emirates Sheikh Zayed has always been a great man, who made his country rich during the years of his governing. The people of the Emirates love and honor him, which means that the pictures of Sheikh Zayed are very popular in the country. The portraits of Sheikh Zayed can be found in many offices, homes, cars, etc. “4dStudioR” company is located in Dubai, and these days is going to offer a portrait of Sheikh Zayed in the form of a full color hologram from the smallest up to almost meter sizes to the Emirates market.
I wasn’t enough free at that time, but it was really interesting for me to try something new. I got down to business and I could not even imagine what amount of work is ahead of me...
The beginning of work on this project was ordinary, as with the experience of 10 years in the CG / 3D I can do many things automatically. A little later it turned out, that there was not enough photographic material, and the one I obtained, was with low-resolution printing, no more than a few hundred pixels. I realized that to complete this project – I need more time than I expected, because besides this project I also had my major work. Thus, I devoted all my free time to this project during the evenings. Since it was clear, that the photography cannot be used for textures, I had to create everything from scratch. My favorite tool “Maya” was of great importance at that moment and the small physical details (pores and wrinkles) were created in the “Zbrush”. Neither this part of work, nor the search of similarities took the biggest part of time. The ordinary modelling and sculpting was done quickly. In order to achieve photorealism (photographic accuracy), I had to spend hundreds of hours on rendering test. More than 80% of workflow looked as follows: I changed one of the options, e.g. skin shader (subsurface skin), clicked “fragment render”, waited, saw the result, changed another option, clicked “fragment render” etc.
Gradually, a portrait was completed. Initially, the project was prepared for printing in “Geola” company, but later the preference was given to “Rabbitholes” and I had to reconfigure the stage. The final rendering on three machines (pc) took more than 3 days (1,200 frames with a resolution of 2854х613 pixels).