The Righteous Gemstones

The Righteous Gemstones is Danny McBride’s HBO comedy about a famous yet dysfunctional family of televangelists, which premiered in August 2019. The series stars McBride alongside John Goodman, Edi Patterson, Adam DeVine, Cassidy Freeman, Tony Cavalero, and Tim Baltz.

SCANable performed 3D body and face scanning of John Goodman for the series’ de-aging visual effects, capturing high-resolution photogrammetry of his likeness for the VFX team.

De-aging begins with a truthful record of the present

It is tempting to think of de-aging as a problem of finding old photographs. It is not. The reference for the younger face may be decades of archive material, but the asset being modified is the performer as they are now — scanned, measured, and dimensionally exact.

Skull proportion, the placement of features, the specific geometry that makes a face that person: all of it persists. What changes with age is soft tissue, volume, and skin surface, and those are the things the work adjusts.

Starting from a measured capture means the adjustment is applied to a real head rather than to a modeler’s reconstruction of one. Get the base wrong and no amount of youthful smoothing produces the right person, only a younger stranger.

Skin has to be captured as more than color

A photograph of a face records skin under whatever light was present, with the highlights baked in. Reuse that as a texture and the asset arrives in every shot carrying the lighting of the room it was scanned in.

Cross-polarized photography solves this by separating the diffuse response from the specular. The diffuse pass gives true surface color with no highlights; the specular pass describes how the skin reflects — pore-level detail, the sheen along a cheekbone, the difference between forehead and jaw.

Kept separate, they produce a relightable asset that behaves correctly under whatever the sequence requires rather than fighting it. That separation is the core of photometric capture, and it is what makes a scanned face usable in a lit shot.

Face and body are one asset, not two

Facial work fails at the neck as often as it fails at the face. A head captured in isolation has to be married to a body captured separately, and the join is where the discrepancy shows — in scale, in posture, in the way weight sits on the shoulders.

Recording both in the same session, to the same standard and the same coordinate frame, removes that reconciliation entirely. The head is already on the right body, at the right scale, in a consistent pose.

Our Mobile CyberSCAN™ Studios run head and full-body capture on the same deployment, and everything ships as render-ready geometry for the vendor’s pipeline.

More episodic television work is in the portfolio, alongside our digital human services.