Whether your goal is to shoot at a physical location or complete principal photography on an LED volume, virtual locations are quickly becoming the new way of scouting and previzing your project, animated or live action.

What is 3D scanning?

Three-dimensional scanning collects data through photogrammetry and laser-scanning technology and performs three-dimensional reconstruction to create digital models of real environments and objects in the virtual world.  These models have a wide range of applications, such as industrial design, error detection, reverse engineering, robotic guidance, geological surveying, medical and biological information, criminal identification, digital cultural relics repository and also film production and game creation.

The data generated from the motion capture session was more than was needed and to ease the amount

Our Location

Si Xin Fang, also known as Sixin Lane, is a historical building located in Hangzhou, China in the Province of Zhejiang. With a refurbished facade in the style of the Ming and Quing Dynasties, the building materials are like antiques and made for the perfect location to digitally encapsulate.

The building begins from the middle of Xueshi Road to the south and reaches Chengdeli to the north, the southern section of Puti Temple road to the west, and is blocked to the east. This block is 91 meters long and 3 meters wide (300 ft x 10 ft). During the Qing Dynasty, it was called Fuchang Alley, bordered with a yellow banner and used as a military camp. At the founding of the Republic of China, Tai Chi scholar Chen Xin built the house here that thereafter would be known as Si Xin Fang.

The initial plan of our digital asset team was to scan and reconstruct all digital assets for this location using 3D scanning in order to create a set of service based solutions to be used in film and television projects and to fully realize how to recreate real world locations and workflows.

Lay of the Land

The total land area of Si Xin Fang is 9000㎡, just over 2 acres.  The surface area of the building facades  measured in at  3700㎡ or 40,000 square feet. A total of 33,634 photos were compiled to create a 2.6 TB file that generated 40,354,697 data points totaling 2.26 GB. The 28 laser sites generated a total of 565,294,618 data points totaling 12 GB.

As both virtual production and new filmmaking workflows are adopted by storytellers, virtual locations will become a clear and evident production step for directors, DPs and producers. More and more physical locations will be replicated through 3D scanning methods.

At Versatile Media we have over 100,000 assets in our rapidly growing asset library. So whether we create your environment or we intake files from your VAD team, our stages at all our global locations are built to absorb virtual locations so that productions can efficiently and easily scout, explore and set camera angles, measure and take photos of locations and integrate those results into a larger, virtual production workflow. Our VR stages run on NVIDIA RTX and Unreal Engine technology. 

Whether you are completing full cg sequences or finalizing a live action scene for LED stage filming, virtual location scouting is here to stay. Take a walk through Sixin Lane here!