Carbonite is a series of frozen famous personalities, referencing Star Wars.

A carbonite slab is procedurally & automatically generated from the photo. It uses some simple machine learning to scan and extrude real face geometry from photo, so it's not just a luminance-based extrusion.

Since an author does procedural art, there are no 3D apps used for rendering: slab geometry, material, and lighting also generated procedurally.