laser scan for a film set.
For a film company, we laser-scanned a historic site, then turned the point clouds of a period film backlot into a dense mesh and a clean, usable model.
- location
- a film backlot
- year
- 2020
- sector
- film · laser scanning
- system
- laser scan · point cloud · tiled mesh · clean surface model
- made by
- matter make
the project
In January 2020 we took our laser scanner to a historic fort for a film company. We set it up thirteen times and joined the scans into one point cloud, several gigabytes of it. Then we turned that into meshes, and a model someone could open and use.
A few months later they came back with a bigger job. This time the scanning was already done: two period sets on a film backlot, with streets, squares and arcades, about fifty gigabytes of points between them. Our job was to make that usable, and we made it two ways. One was a heavy mesh, built tile by tile, that keeps every cart wheel and loose roof tile. The other was a much lighter model of clean surfaces drawn over the points, for when you only need the walls, the ledges and the windows.
The first clean model was too clean in places. They sent back eleven screenshots: a window ledge was off, a roof was missing its timbers, a corner didn’t sit where the points said it should. They were right. We went back to the point cloud and sent two more versions within a week.
A set is a strange thing to measure. Some of these buildings are only a front, built to be seen from one side. The scanner doesn’t mind. It records what’s there, and our job is to keep the model honest to it.
