The Greatest Showman

The Greatest Showman (2017) is 20th Century Fox’s original musical inspired by P.T. Barnum and the birth of show business, starring Hugh Jackman. Directed by Michael Gracey, the film celebrates a visionary who rose from nothing to create a spectacle that became a worldwide sensation, with Michelle Williams, Zac Efron, Zendaya, and Rebecca Ferguson co-starring.

SCANable captured a detailed full-body 3D scan of Zendaya along with numerous facial expressions, and performed 3D LiDAR set scanning across numerous sets in Burbank, California — photogrammetric capture and laser-scan data that supported the film’s visual effects.

One neutral scan is not a face

A face at rest describes very little of a face in performance. Skin slides over bone, volume redistributes, and the particular shapes a person’s face makes are as identifying as its proportions.

Capturing a range of expressions alongside the neutral gives modelling and rigging real targets to hit, rather than generic blendshapes borrowed from somebody else’s anatomy. The rig is then corrected toward measurements of the actual performer instead of animated until it looks close.

That is the difference between a digital double that resembles someone and one that behaves like them.

Scanning a stage between setups

Set scanning on a working stage is a scheduling problem as much as a technical one. The space is occupied, lit for camera, full of crew, and available in gaps.

The answer is a capture plan made in advance: positions chosen for coverage, a route that keeps the team out of everyone’s way, and enough overlap between setups that registration is never in doubt. Laser scanning handles the volume — walls, floors, heights, the true distances between things — fast enough to fit the gaps a shooting day leaves.

Set and location scanning is what turns a standing set into a permanent measured record before it is struck and the stage is given to the next build.

The environment is reference for the performer

It is tempting to treat a body scan and a set scan as unrelated deliverables. They are not.

A digital double has to be lit as though it were standing in the photographed space, and that requires knowing the space: where the surfaces are, how far away they are, what they would bounce. Environment capture is what lets a lighting artist place a character into a plate rather than in front of it.

Captured together, in one coordinate system, the two datasets do a job neither does alone.

Browse more feature film work, or read how cyberscanning works.