I just returned from a fruitful consultation at the US headquarters of Zoller & Fröhlich, just outside Pittsburgh in Bridgeville, PA. I reached out to them with an odd request: would it be possible to 3D scan a plaster cast of David Bowie’s face?

I acquired the plaster cast life mask of The Thin White Duke from VFX artist William Forsche. It was made from a mold created in the late ’70s, is exquisitely detailed, and looks fantastic - in an eerie, uncanny valley sort of way.

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I started thinking about 3D scanning the moment it arrived. The TrueDepth IR camera used for FaceID on the iPhone can also be used as a pocket 3D scanner - it projects over 30,000 points onto the subject. I tried using the Hedges iPhone app to capture 3D information from the cast but even with screen mirroring to help, I obtained messy results.

I decided to look for professional high-resolution scanning operations, but I don’t live in LA (Hooray for Hollywood) so my choices were limited. One company stood out to me: Zoller & Fröhlich. It was founded in Germany and they make and sell industrial-grade laser scanners - with a strong focus on architectural mapping - capable of snapping 3D pictures of entire buildings. Cathedrals for instance, often have flourishes similar to my plaster cast so I decided to send them an email.

Soon after, I received a response from Katelyn Turoski who is in their sales department. It was an interesting request and they’d like to give it a shot!

They invited me to their headquarters (a nondescript commercial office park where my accountant is coincidentally located, so I knew exactly where to go) and said to bring David’s face. At the appointed time Katelyn greeted me and brought me back to a conference room where I met laser support engineer Joe Carter and CEO Juergen Mauer. I took the plaster cast out of the bag and introduced them to the late great David Bowie.

We soon got down to business. And by we, I mean they, because they did all the work. Juergen pointed to a device mounted on a tripod and explained that it was one of the scanners they would be using, the Z+F IMAGER 5016. Typically used for laser scanning and surveying so it was a bit like using a firehose to put out a match. Remember the iPhone's 30k points? The Z+F IMAGER 5016 can throw over 50 million points. All of that data is recorded and used to create a detailed 3D map of an area and everything within it.

It's like one of those pin screens but giant-sized and using lasers.

50 million points sounds like a lot - and it is - but they wouldn't all be used to map David’s face - just a portion. Setting the proper expectations, Juergen explained this limitation, literally down to the millimeter, and noted, “the resolution on the cast might be limited, but we’ll see what happens.” I was just chuffed that they were willing to give it a go and was happy just to have the experience, let alone a good scan.

With the click of a mouse the device started spinning like something out of Star Trek and invisible (and safe) pulses of light started bouncing around the room. Light doesn’t bend around objects though, so three scans were made with the device in different location. This ensured that an accurate representation of the face cast was recorded. The data appeared on a nearby laptop and using Z+F’s software (and his experience and skill) Joe dexterously began stitching everything together - kind of like 3D photoshop. In short order, a bounding box containing the point cloud data of David Bowie’s face frozen in time appeared on the screen.

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Thank you @ZF_USA for lending your expertise to my #davidbowie life scan project. More details to come! #zollerfröhlich #pointcloud #aladinsane

A post shared by ⭕️ J O Y C O M P L E X ⭕️ (@joycomplex) on Jan 28, 2020 at 12:53pm PST

Bowie’s ethereal visage, rotating on a digital gimbal, moved like a spectral presence, on the cusp of opening his eyes and ready to perform a song. It really got me thinking; could this point cloud be rigged or mapped via performance capture to another face perhaps to make a music video of some sort? But I had to snap out of it!

Juergen gave me some tips on some open-source software I could use to further manipulate the point cloud data to generate a 3D mesh that I could import into ZBrush for painting or sculpting. Then everything was transferred to a flash drive.

How amazing? In under an hour I was on my way home with a detailed scan of David Bowie's face in my pocket!

I’d like to thank everyone on Zoller & Fröhlich USA for taking some time out of their schedule to indulge my oddball request for my as-yet-undetermined David Bowie project. Everyone was friendly, knowledgable, and eager to give things a go. It was a pleasure.

Where will this lead? Who can say? But then again, who would have imagined that a copy of David Bowie's face made in 1975 would end up being digitized in 2020 and on a computer in Pittsburgh, PA.

ABOUT Zoller & Fröhlich

Z+F is a privately owned company, founded in 1963 by Hans Zoller and Hans Fröhlich in Wangen, Germany. The company supplies laser scanning hardware, software and scanning services capturing high resolution data. The firm covers a wide spectrum in the field of laser measurement technology: they develop hardware and software, and offer sales and product training.