Black Panther: Wakanda Forever

Black Panther: Wakanda Forever is Marvel Studios’ 2022 sequel starring Letitia Wright as Shuri, who takes up the Black Panther mantle. Directed by Ryan Coogler, who co-wrote the screenplay with Joe Robert Cole, the 30th film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe follows the leaders of Wakanda as they fight to protect their nation in the wake of King T’Challa’s death. Lupita Nyong’o, Danai Gurira, Winston Duke, Florence Kasumba, Dominique Thorne, Michaela Coel, Mabel Cadena, Tenoch Huerta Mejía, Martin Freeman, Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Angela Bassett co-star, with Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures distributing.

SCANable provided 3D scanning of characters, props and locations for the blockbuster feature film, capturing body scans and point-cloud data as accurate digital assets for the visual effects teams.

Three kinds of data, one coordinate space

Characters, props, and locations are usually treated as separate scanning jobs. On a production of this scale they cannot be, because everything eventually has to sit in the same shot.

A performer captured at one scale, a prop captured at another, and a location point cloud with its own origin will not assemble. The work of keeping all three in a single, real-world-accurate coordinate space happens at capture time, not in post — and getting it wrong there is expensive to fix later.

That is the practical argument for having one team cover all three disciplines rather than three vendors covering one each.

Body scanning under costume

Marvel wardrobe is armor as often as it is clothing. It is rigid, it is sculpted, and it changes the silhouette of the person wearing it in ways that cannot be simulated convincingly from a nude scan.

Capturing performers in full costume produces the real thing: the actual break of a shoulder plate, the actual drape of fabric on that specific body, the actual standing posture the costume enforces. That is what a digital double is built from.

Our Mobile CyberSCAN™ Studios travel to the production for exactly this reason. Costume and makeup take hours to apply and cannot be moved off the lot; the scan has to come to them.

Point cloud as the measured record

Point-cloud capture is a different instrument answering a different question. Where photogrammetry excels at surface detail on a subject, LiDAR excels at the geometry of a space — the volume of a room, the run of a wall, the true distance between two things.

A registered point cloud is the ground truth a whole VFX sequence is planned against. Set extensions build outward from it, digital environments align to it, and camera solves resolve against it. Once it exists, arguments about where something actually was stop being arguments.

That data is captured through our set and location scanning service, generally in the same visit as the character work.

Props, and why they get scanned early

Hero props on a Marvel production are one-of-a-kind builds and they are rarely available twice. Scanning them while they exist and are intact creates a permanent record — one that survives the object being damaged, repainted, or struck.

The digital version then does the things the physical one cannot: appear in an environment that does not exist, take damage that cannot be staged, or be duplicated across a shot.

What ships to the vendors

Nothing leaves as raw capture. Scan output moves through retopology, texturing, and render-ready asset builds first — correctly scaled, sensibly UV’d, and named to the production’s convention.

On a film routing work across several major facilities, that consistency is the deliverable as much as the geometry is. Vendors sharing a coherent asset library produce a coherent film.

See more feature film projects, or read about cyberscanning — the simultaneous-capture technique behind our character work.