A 3D hologram band for a music data company

a 3d band that loops inside a three-sided holographic display, made for a trade show booth. the client is Azimuth, a live music data company: market intelligence and predictive routing for promoters, venues and the people who book shows for cities. the band floats over a map of the us, because routing tours is what they sell.

the box sets the rules. inside a dreamoc xl3 pure black turns into glass, so anything dark on a character doesn't get darker, it disappears. no floor, no hard shadows, no smoke in front of the faces, one reflection per glass face, every view mirrored. definition has to come from light, not from shadow.

i measured before building anything. a color chart run in their own unit put the brand violet (#3A278E) at about 15% luma, which in that box is almost invisible. and on the final plate a musician is 85 x 224 px, with a head of 25 to 30 px. so the violet lives in the light, never in the fill, and "more definition" means reading as a person from across the booth, not more texture.

i started where the brief pointed: cinematic. mixamo performances, smoke, concert light, a handheld camera feel. that first direction is what you see in the cover.

then the box took over. i checked the official template against videos filmed inside their own unit and matched the layout to that box: a measured three-face guide and a three-camera rig, one camera per glass, all aimed at a null in the middle of the band. luma and color tests ran on the real display before the band existed.

the part that matters most is the switch. it's one houdini set: change the mixamo take, the props and the lights, and nothing gets rebuilt. hats and boots are parented to the head and foot joints, denim is a shader on the uvs the characters already have, and each look is a switch. that's how the rock band became a country band for day two of the fair, with three looks to choose from, without opening a new scene.

pipeline: mixamo → houdini → karma at 1600x1200 → exr → measured three-face plate → hour-long loops on usb, each file under the 4 gb fat32 limit.

the rock loop shipped for the fair and was approved on the first submit. the same rig carried the country version a few days later, and a short identity bumper built from the cinematic shots went to them as a gift.

what i took from it: cinema quality and hologram quality are two different things. one wants shadow, haze and depth. the other wants light, clean silhouettes and true black. now the same scene can do both.

update, october 2026: the loops ran at the fair and the client came back saying it went extremely well, with really good comments on the video.