I did take a huge break from shooting in the studio and all this time I experimented with other ways to create and tried to find mediums to express myself. One of the many things I've experimented with is photogrammetry, it's a technique where you take hundreds of photos of a subject from many different angles and then use a computer to generate a complex 3d model out of those photos without any sculpting or modeling skills. I have learned about it years ago but wasn't too good at it. And capturing people is even more complicated than still objects. But I set myself to give it a try. Took about 100 photos of myself, with even light and trying not to breathe too deep or blink too much which is surprisingly difficult.
Processing the images is an easy task, especially if you shoot them with a shallow depth of field, and edit them with low contrast so the software can pick up on all the sharp areas that will be full of details to create the model.
First, you get what is called a point cloud, a few hundred thousand colored pixels floating in 3d space.
And after that, the software will spit out a mesh, in this case, a very low-quality one, with a tone of texture imperfection and a few holes, problems that ill have to deal with later on
One other thing I played with within the last few years is Blender3D, a free 3D software that I would recommend to anyone who wants to learn 3d. Its interface is scary at first but after you get used to it, you will hate scrolling through the long menus Adobe apps have to offer and make all of them feel obsolete.
So I imported the mesh of my face in Blender, hat to learn how to make it look smooth, and luckily my beard didn't need that treatment, and with my dodge and burn experience I managed to turn the model into something that started to look like me. As for the textures, that's another story. They didn't turn out too great and it was beyond my skill level to fix them so I turned myself into a greek sculpture.
I was heavily into the Vaporwave & Cyberpunk cultures, at the time, was reading all about them and trying to understand the art styles in order to be able to apply the to my own work so I started mixing it up and turned it from a greek sculpture into a perfect avatar for me, my personality. A base that is hard as a rock in a geeky universe filled with color and VHS glitches to represent my 90's nostalgia.
And since most of our social platforms don't accept animations I also have a still version that is even shaper
