Ms. Marvel

Ms. Marvel is a Marvel Studios miniseries created by Bisha K. Ali for Disney+ that premiered June 8, 2022, starring Iman Vellani as Kamala Khan. Based on the Marvel Comics character Kamala Khan / Ms. Marvel, the six-episode series was the seventh Marvel Cinematic Universe show from the studio, with Ali as head writer and Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah leading a directing team that also included Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy and Meera Menon. Aramis Knight, Saagar Shaikh, Rish Shah, Zenobia Shroff, Mohan Kapur, and Matt Lintz co-star. Filming began in November 2020 in Atlanta, Georgia, and New Jersey before concluding in Thailand in May 2021, and the Phase Four series set up The Marvels (2023), with Vellani reprising her role.

SCANable provided 3D scanning services for the production, capturing talent and props to support the series’ visual effects, including digital doubles, face replacement, and set-extension work.

Face replacement on a young lead

Face replacement is the most demanding use a scan gets put to. The geometry has to track against the performer’s real head motion and hold likeness at the scale a face occupies on screen, frame after frame, with no averaging out of error.

It becomes harder still when the character is a teenager whose face is central to the show’s warmth. Stylization is not available as a fallback — the audience is meant to connect with this person, and a replacement that reads as synthetic breaks that connection immediately.

The only foundation that supports it is measured geometry. A face built from reference photography carries proportional error that is invisible in a still and glaring in motion.

Skin has to be captured, not inferred

Shape gets a face into position; surface response is what makes it read as skin.

Cross-polarized photography separates diffuse color from specular reflection, giving a modeler both what the skin looks like and how it behaves under light. That is what lets a replaced face sit correctly in lighting the capture session never had.

On a series shooting across Atlanta, New Jersey, and Thailand, lighting conditions vary enormously. An asset baked to one condition cannot be moved. Our photometric and OLAT capture produces genuinely relightable results for shows that need to.

Capture that follows an international schedule

A production moving between three widely separated locations cannot route talent back to a fixed facility between units.

Our Mobile CyberSCAN™ Studios travel with the show. A performer steps out of a scene, scans in full costume and makeup, and steps back in — no travel day, and the capture reflects the character as the episode actually presents them.

Why the array fires all at once

A scanning method that sweeps around a subject, or takes several passes, needs the person to hold perfectly still. They cannot. Breathing alone introduces enough movement to soften geometry.

That drift lands on the eyes and mouth — the features that carry likeness — and repairing it by hand is exactly where a face stops being that person’s face. A single instantaneous capture removes the problem instead of correcting for it, which is the whole basis of cyberscanning and of usable digital doubles.

Props and set extension

Alongside the character work, props were captured for the show’s effects program — objects that get duplicated, extended, or made to behave in ways the physical build cannot.

Set-extension work needs measured environment geometry so the digital continuation matches the practical build at the seam; that data comes from our set and location scanning.

Everything ships after in-house retopology, texturing, and render-ready asset builds — scaled, oriented, and named to the production’s convention.

Further television work is worth a look, as is the full service list.