Razer Nabu #LiveSmarter

Razer’s #LiveSmarter commercial (2015) pits the Nabu smartband against a world overrun by zombies, directed by Samm Hodges for Animal. With discreet notifications, fitness tracking and band-to-band communication, the spot makes its case that staying alive — whether among the undead or just people who act like them — has never been easier with the Razer Nabu.

SCANable performed 3D scans of 20 zombies, masks, a zombie head, numerous props and several iconic movie sets located at Universal Studios Hollywood. These photogrammetric digital assets supported Animal’s CG, crowd placement and visual effects work on the campaign.

Makeup only exists while it is on

Prosthetics and character makeup are temporary by definition. They are applied for a shooting day, they degrade over that day, and at the end of it they are removed and thrown away. The next application will be similar but never identical.

That makes a performer in full makeup a subject with an expiry time. Whatever is not captured while the appliance is on cannot be captured later, and a modeller working from continuity stills is reconstructing a three-dimensional object from a handful of two-dimensional views.

Capturing the performer as made up records the actual appliance — its thickness, how it sits against the real face, where the blend edges fall — as measured geometry rather than as interpretation.

Scanning somewhere you do not control

A production stage is built around the shoot. A working location is not. It has its own operating hours, its own access rules, its own traffic, and its own opinion about how long anyone can stand in one place with equipment.

That reshapes the capture plan. Coverage has to be sequenced so the highest-value geometry is secured first, positions have to work around obstructions that cannot be moved, and the whole pass has to fit a window that was negotiated rather than scheduled.

Our set and location scanning is built for that constraint, and our Mobile CyberSCAN™ Studios exist so the capability arrives where the production already is.

Masks and heads are not faces

A commercial like this puts three different subject types in front of the same crew: living performers, rigid props, and objects that imitate anatomy without being it.

Each behaves differently. A face has predictable topology a pipeline expects, and it moves. A mask is rigid, thin-walled, and hollow — which means the inside surface matters and the edges are far sharper than any real anatomy. Props sit somewhere between, often with materials that reflect or absorb light in ways skin never does.

Treating them all as one workflow produces three mediocre assets. Handling each as its own problem, then finishing everything through consistent retopology and render-ready builds, is what lets them share a shot.

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