Venom: Let There Be Carnage

LiDAR Scanning for Venom: Let There Be Carnage

Venom: Let There Be Carnage introduces Cletus Kasady and Carnage alongside Tom Hardy’s Venom… two large-scale CG symbiote characters instead of one, which raises the bar on every environment they need to convincingly move through. We provided additional LiDAR scanning for the production.

When a creature this size is interacting with real streets, buildings and surfaces, the scan data behind those environments is what makes the interaction believable. We combined point cloud processing with high-resolution photogrammetry to deliver fully textured assets rather than raw geometry… get that wrong and Carnage looks like he’s sliding over the top of a scene rather than moving through it, a problem no amount of creature animation can fully paper over.

We delivered point clouds, processed meshes and reference data to Sony’s pipeline spec, with on-set scanning scheduled to fit around principal photography rather than disrupt it… the coordination that lets a VFX-heavy shoot keep moving at the pace the schedule demands.

A sequel that adds a second major CG creature to the mix doesn’t get to lower its standards just because the effects budget is stretched further. Our scanning work gave the production the same spatial grounding it needed for one symbiote, doubled… the unglamorous part of the job that makes the genuinely spectacular parts land.