Fast X

Fast X is Universal Pictures’ 2023 action film in which Dominic Toretto’s family is hunted by Dante Reyes, the vengeful son of drug lord Hernan Reyes. After Dante frames the crew for a bombing in Rome, the team is scattered across the globe — Letty imprisoned at a black site alongside Cipher, Jakob protecting Dom’s son Little B, and Dom confronting Dante from Rio de Janeiro to a dam rigged with explosives — as betrayals mount and allies old and new, including Deckard Shaw and the returning Gisele Yashar, are drawn back into the fight.

SCANable provided 3D scanning for the production, delivering LiDAR environment capture and photogrammetry data used by the visual effects teams for set extensions and CG sequence work on the franchise’s signature large-scale action.

Measuring a place before you destroy it

Large-scale action has an awkward relationship with location work. The sequence needs a real place — a street, a plaza, a structure — and then it needs that place to do something no city will permit.

The resolution is to capture the environment accurately first. Once a location exists as a registered point cloud, it can be extended, damaged, collapsed, or driven through at speeds no permit would allow, and it will still read as the place that was photographed.

LiDAR set and location scanning is the capture side of that. What comes back is a measured record of the space — dimensions, surfaces, and relationships accurate to the millimeter.

Why environment capture is a scheduling problem

Locations are borrowed. A production has a street for a night, a plaza for a morning, and then it hands the space back.

That means environment scanning cannot be scheduled around the scanning team’s convenience. It happens in the window the production has, often overnight, often between setups, and often while a unit is still working nearby.

Deploying to the location instead of asking the production to accommodate a facility is the entire model. Our Mobile CyberSCAN™ Studios apply the same principle to character work.

Set extension on a moving camera

A static set extension is comparatively forgiving. A set extension behind a camera mounted to a vehicle travelling at speed is not.

Every frame changes the perspective relationship between the practical foreground and the digital continuation. If the CG geometry does not match the real geometry precisely, the extension slides — and a sliding background on a moving shot is immediately visible even to viewers who could not name what is wrong.

Point-cloud data is what prevents that. The extension is built outward from measured geometry rather than estimated from a plate, so the two stay locked as the camera moves.

Camera solves that land the first time

The same data serves matchmove. A camera track solved against real measured geometry resolves to real positions in a real space; a track solved by eye against a plate is inference, and inference drifts.

On a film with hundreds of vehicle-mounted and aerial shots, the compounding cost of unreliable solves is enormous. Measured geometry converts a recurring post-production problem into a one-time capture task.

Handing environment data to VFX

Raw scan data is not a deliverable. Registered, cleaned, correctly oriented, real-world-scaled point clouds and derived geometry are — and that processing happens through our modeling and asset build work before anything reaches a vendor.

For sequences that need environment reconstruction with photographic fidelity rather than pure geometry, Gaussian splatting and aerial photogrammetry cover ground that terrestrial LiDAR alone cannot.

More film scanning work is in the portfolio, and the full service list covers the rest.