48 Hours, 2 Stadiums. Challenge Accepted.
A production company needed two stadium-scale 3D meshes built to VFX spec — in Penang, on a tight timeline. We deployed drone aerial capture, aerial LiDAR, and ground-level SLAM to deliver the kind of geometry that holds up inside Houdini.
Not a scan for documentation. A mesh for production.
The call came in from a production company with a clear requirement: two stadiums in Penang, captured and delivered as high-resolution OBJ meshes — geometry clean enough to hold up inside a Houdini VFX pipeline. No room to cut corners on density or accuracy. The mesh had to be real.
Stadiums are not straightforward scan subjects. Complex curved roof structures, multi-level concourses, open pitch areas, and dense seating geometry all demand coverage from angles that no single capture method can achieve alone.
"The deliverable wasn't a point cloud or a reference model. It was production-grade mesh geometry — the kind that gets textured, lit, and composited into live footage."
Our Approach
Two data streams. One unified mesh.
AXYZ Solutions deployed a hybrid capture strategy across both stadiums — pairing aerial and ground-level methods to ensure no surface was missed and no geometry was inferred.
Aerial imagery capture
The drone flew systematic coverage passes over each stadium, capturing high-resolution overlapping imagery for photogrammetric reconstruction of roofing, upper tiers, and open structures.
Aerial LiDAR
The same deployment carried a LiDAR payload, collecting dense point cloud data from above — giving us precise geometry for large-span roof structures, stands, and exterior facades that imagery alone cannot fully resolve.
Ground-level SLAM scanning
For concourse areas, interiors, lower seating bowls, and any zone below the drone's effective capture angle, we walked both stadiums with a high-accuracy SLAM scanner — capturing what aerial methods simply can't reach.
Processing and mesh delivery
Each stadium required three days of processing — registration, fusion, mesh reconstruction, and clean-up — resulting in a production-ready OBJ file for each site, delivered to the VFX team.
The Result
Two stadiums. Two production-grade meshes. Delivered.
Both final meshes are publicly viewable via SuperSplat, giving the production team and any collaborators a browser-accessible reference to verify geometry before it enters the Houdini pipeline.
"When geometry is going into a VFX pipeline, it has to be right. Every slab edge, every roofline, every stand — captured from the air and on the ground, fused into one mesh."
Why It Matters
Large-scale geometry for large-scale production.
Stadium-scale 3D capture is a problem that rewards the right tool combination. Aerial LiDAR handles the structures no person can safely reach or measure. SLAM handles the complex interior geometry that drones can't see. Together, they produce the kind of spatially complete, metrically accurate mesh that survives the scrutiny of a professional VFX pipeline.
For production companies, architectural visualisation studios, and game or simulation teams working with real-world landmark geometry — this is how AXYZ Solutions delivers it.
Working on a large-scale capture project?
Get in touch to discuss scan-to-mesh delivery for your production or visualisation pipeline.
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