A look behind the scenes at MANTIS by Leica Geosystems.
If you’re in visual effects, you’ll definitely already be familiar with on-set solutions for capturing 3D scene data. You might already be using a laser scanner to capture 3D point clouds and HDR panoramic imagery, and then using that to help reconstruct locations and to aid in tracking and matchmoving.
One of the companies that currently makes such laser scanners is Leica Geosystems (they make the BLK360, for instance). Well, measurement technology company HEXGAON has now announced a new player in this space: the MANTIS by Leica Geosystems.
And it does things a little differently.
How? Well, MANTIS captures scene geometry and camera movement at the same time as your cinema camera is rolling. That means it captures per-frame spatial information along with the footage you are capturing with the main camera. The team notes that VFX practitioners might use the tool in addition to other set scanning and surveying approaches.
In hardware terms, MANTIS is a box that fixes onto the front of the camera system. With the accompanying MANTIS Studio, it processes the data you capture and it can be used for a number of things: LiDAR-corrected depth maps, camera tracks, position data and point clouds.
Check out the video below for a demo of how MANITS works.
Indeed, here’s a quick list of things that the MANTIS team say the new tool can help with existing VFX workflows:
Camera & tracking
– Camera tracking / matchmove
– Footage stabilization via pose stream
– Point-cloud / solve validation
Compositing
– Depth-based roto / matte extraction (2D-channel)
– Deep compositing / Z-based holdouts
– PostVis compositing
– Depth-based re-lighting / comp
3D integration
– Set extension / 3D environment integration
– CG integration / ground-interaction
– 2D-to-3D stereo conversion
Depth-driven effects
– Atmospheric / volumetric effects (2D-channel)
– Synthetic depth of field / defocus (2D-channel)
– Selective color grading by depth (2D-channel)
Data & documentation
– Continuous set documentation
– Depth-model training data
Hexagon is demonstrating MANTIS during Infinity Festival on 12 – 15 November, and MANTIS will begin shipping in Q1 2027.
For more information, check out mantis.leica-geosystems.com
