Blue Beetle

Blue Beetle is DC Studios’ 2023 superhero film starring Xolo Maridueña as Jaime Reyes, directed by Angel Manuel Soto from a screenplay by Gareth Dunnet-Alcocer. Based on the DC Comics character and produced with the Safran Company, the 14th film in the DC Extended Universe also stars Bruna Marquezine, Adriana Barraza, Damián Alcázar, Raoul Max Trujillo, Susan Sarandon and George Lopez. Originally developed for HBO Max before shifting to theaters, the film shot from late May to mid-July 2022 in the Atlanta metropolitan area at Wilder Studios in Decatur, Georgia, as well as in El Paso, Texas and Puerto Rico, and was released in the United States on August 18, 2023, by Warner Bros. Pictures.

SCANable provided 3D scanning for the production, capturing cast body scans, environments and props as photogrammetry-based digital assets to support the film’s visual effects and set extension work.

A suit that is entirely digital

When a character’s costume is CG rather than practical, body scanning stops being a convenience and becomes the foundation of the whole character.

The digital suit has to fit a specific human body. Not a generic one — the actual proportions, the actual posture, the actual way that person stands and moves. If the underlying body is approximate, the suit sits wrong, and every shot of the character inherits the error.

Full-body photogrammetric capture supplies that foundation. What the VFX team receives is the performer as they actually are, at a resolution that supports building on top of.

Three locations, one capture program

Production moved between studio stages in the Atlanta area, El Paso, and Puerto Rico. Each contributed environments the film needed captured.

That is not three separate scanning jobs — it is one asset library gathered in three places, and it has to be internally consistent. Environments captured at different times, in different states, still have to share a scale convention and a naming scheme so the film assembles.

Our set and location scanning travels to wherever the production is, for exactly this reason.

Set extension needs the join to disappear

Practical builds stop at the top of frame; CG continues them. The audience only notices if the transition is wrong.

An extension modeled outward from measured point-cloud geometry shares the practical set’s exact dimensions and perspective, so the seam lands correctly and stays correct as the camera moves. An extension estimated from a plate does not, and the mismatch reveals itself on the first significant camera move.

Environments a character flies through

A film whose lead can fly generates shots where the camera occupies positions no physical camera could reach. Those environments have to exist as complete, dimensionally accurate geometry rather than as the fraction the practical set covered.

Measured capture is what makes them extendable in every direction. Where an environment needs photographic appearance rather than pure geometry, Gaussian splatting captures things a conventional mesh cannot.

Props, and delivery to the vendors

Hero props on a superhero film are one-off builds that are frequently unavailable and eventually struck. Scanning them creates a record that outlasts the object and can do things the object cannot.

Everything — body scans, environments, props — moves through in-house retopology, texturing, and render-ready asset builds before delivery, arriving correctly scaled, sensibly UV’d, and named to the production’s convention.

Character capture runs through our Mobile CyberSCAN™ Studios, where every camera fires at the same instant so digital doubles arrive without the drift that swept capture introduces. See cyberscanning for the technique.

More feature film projects is in the portfolio, and the full service list covers the rest.