The Falcon and the Winter Soldier

The Falcon and the Winter Soldier is a Marvel Studios miniseries for Disney+ starring Anthony Mackie and Sebastian Stan, which premiered in 2021. Created by head writer Malcolm Spellman and directed by Kari Skogland, the six-episode series is based on the Marvel Comics characters Sam Wilson / Falcon and Bucky Barnes / Winter Soldier, set in the Marvel Cinematic Universe after the events of Avengers: Endgame (2019) as part of Phase Four. Daniel Brühl, Emily VanCamp, and Wyatt Russell also star, with filming taking place in Atlanta, Georgia.

SCANable performed 3D scanning across the production, capturing sets, actors, props, and other items — LiDAR environment scans and photogrammetric body scanning that supported the series’ visual effects.

Delivering to the specification, not to the format

An accurate scan that arrives in the wrong shape still costs a vendor days. Accuracy is the minimum; usability is the deliverable.

That means the specifics that never appear in a showreel. Units and up-axis matching the receiving pipeline. Quad-dominant topology with edge flow that deforms sensibly rather than a raw triangulated shell. UV layout with sane texel density and no overlapping shells. File naming that matches the production’s asset convention exactly, including the parts that look arbitrary.

None of it is glamorous, and all of it determines whether an asset is opened and used or opened and rebuilt. Modeling and asset preparation is treated as part of the capture job rather than as something that happens to the data afterwards.

When several facilities share the same asset

Large productions distribute their visual effects across multiple vendors, and sequences that share a character, a costume, or a location routinely land in different buildings.

If each facility derives its own version from its own reference, the versions diverge — slightly different proportions, slightly different scale, slightly different interpretation of the same suit. Those differences are invisible in isolation and obvious in a cut.

A single measured asset removes the divergence at the source. Every vendor starts from identical geometry, so consistency across episodes is inherited rather than negotiated.

Talent, props, and sets captured to one standard

There is a practical advantage to one team handling all three. A performer, the object they carry, and the room they stand in are captured to the same units, the same conventions, and the same tolerances.

That means they assemble later without anyone rescaling or re-registering anything. A prop sits in a hand at the right size. A digital double stands in a scanned environment at the right height, with feet on the actual floor plane rather than near it.

Fragmented capture produces data that is individually fine and collectively awkward, and reconciling it consumes exactly the schedule the scanning was supposed to protect.

Explore more television VFX work, or read how cyberscanning produces this data.