hey, just messing about with hologram effects, but im really here to ask how i can easly achieve holograms like in avatar: http://www.chaosgroup.com/en/2/envyspot.html?i=8
oh yeah, this is what i did:
I tried to tinker around in Blender 2.5, and the closest I could get to what I think you described was modelling a quick landscape, setting it as the parent of a very small cube, and setting dupliverts on the landscape. If you make the landscape ridiculously dense, you get a lot of little floating cubes in the shape of the landscape. If you use this method, remember to set the alpha transparency level of the landscape to zero and turn off the landscape’s specular highlights and shadows.
A problem with the method above that I haven’t figured out is how you can set different parts of the landscape as different colors. I haven’t tried it, but maybe you could map a texture to an object or something like that. I’m not that well-versed in that though. Another problem with this method would be that, to my knowledge, you can’t modify individual cubes, so you can’t fine-tune things to your liking.
Another method to achieving the effect that I haven’t tried but, in my mind, seems promising, is to use armatures. Get one cube and put two array modifiers on it: one in the x direction, and one in the y direction. Apply both of the modifiers, so that you actually get a lot of cubes in a plane that you can mess around with. Next, put armatures just above where you want to edit the cube-plane, and weight paint the corresponding parts of the cube-plane that you want to be affected by the armature. Make sure that each individual cube is one solid weight-painted color though, or else you’ll get some funny-shaped cubes.
Good luck.
In that blog it has a link to the company that provided Avatar with some software, and in there, was this link for the software that they used.:
http://software.primefocusworld.com/software/products/krakatoa/overview/
(I’m summarizing)-
It’s a volumetric particle toolkit, can use the mesh’s vertices for particles, can render volumetric or additive(add rgb value of object to whatever solid is behind it) scenes, can use the particles to self-light each other, etc etc etc…
Well, you could just use a solidified mesh with a volumetric material, or somehow get a point-cloud… although I’m not quite sure how…
(on the side, I like how they make cheese with that software-http://software.primefocusworld.com/images/software/content/krakatoa/screenshots/krakatoa_2.jpg)
It seems to me that you did a pretty good job on your first attempt, but I know you’re trying to go for more depth, right? I think you’re going to give yourself a headache trying to directly replicate the technique they used for that effect, especially if they used a specific particles plug-in. Particles take up so much processing power once you get into large numbers.
Check out this link by Mike Pan: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_erYebogWUw
He used relief mapping on a flat plane to simulate a 3D environment in the blender game engine. It looks pretty darn good if you ask me, and I can’t help but wonder, why not try to create a flat plane yourself and use mapping and texturing techniques to 1) simulate the 3D environment that the hologram is supposed to represent and 2) simulate the textural composition of the hologram (i.e. the little cubes). I’ve been working a lot in After Effects lately, so that’s where my head is, but I’ve used a lot of Alpha Mattes lately. I wonder if there’s a way to use a fractal 3D cube image as an Alpha Matte texture layer to give the appearance that the hologram is composed of millions of little tiny cubic pixels.
Just some thought anyway.
I haven’t tried this approach to particles yet, but couldn’t you make a heavily subsurfed model with some volumetric stuff and a halos with a tiny amount of emitted light, so that it looks like the real material, except its dots? just wondering…
That is an interesting question, I have never actually tried to do that. I’m curious though. Ill try to see what I can do.I’ll share if I come up with anything useful.
Hi guys I saw this thread and decided to make a quick video tut, check it out! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1GG3Eia-ZzE
wow really nice job with that tut interius think thats exactly it lol
Oh good, I’m glad I didnt go to all that work and have it bomb. 
Be sure and subscribe, I’m going to be putting up more tips/tuts every week to every other week.
Looks wonderful Interius.
Thank you sir.
Very useful tut. As usual I understood the methods, but would never have thought of this application.
Well if ya like it, subscribe to my channel, I’ll try to put a new tut up every week or two.
Unless I missed something your just using halo materials. Halo != tiny cubes, unless theres some way you can have each halo mimic an object.
have you tried messing about with the particle emitters?
heres a dude who did it in adobe AE. i wonder if you might be able to do it in Blender with domains and emitters etc.
