Los Angeles, California
We capture the real world into accurate, production-ready digital twins.
Apple Vision Pro · visionOS
The digital twins inside Apple Vision Pro
FICTOR records environments, props and assets from thirteen complementary sources, then rebuilds them as measured 3D environments, infrastructure and asset libraries on an Unreal Engine and OpenUSD pipeline.
Members of FICTOR's team were part of the photoreal Environments built into visionOS, the Apple Vision Pro operating system: real places, captured on location and rebuilt as digital twins that surround the viewer. The work included Bora Bora and the six environments above.
Built by veterans of Sony Pictures Imageworks, Industrial Light & Magic, Framestore, Method Studios and PDI DreamWorks. Meet the team →
Illustrative images of each location, shown with and without a digital-twin wireframe; they are not Apple's environments. Apple, Apple Vision Pro and visionOS are trademarks of Apple Inc.
Four ways in
Pick where you need us
Engage across the whole pipeline, or at a single point. The craft is the same at any size.
Virtual Scouting
The location studied, measured and mapped in 3D before anyone books a flight. You get schedule and budget before we start.
Before the shoot →On-Set Supervision
A named supervisor on the call sheet, so plates, data and reference arrive VFX-ready instead of being reverse-engineered in post.
On the day →Data Capture
Thirteen sources, all equipment owned and operated by FICTOR, recorded in seventeen countries. Buy any of them on its own.
Thirteen sources →In Studio Work
Integration, tracking, modeling, texturing, look development and real-time build — the work that consumes most of a project's time.
Ten disciplines →See it built
A street corner, from point cloud to final model
Ten passes over one captured location in Venice, California, and five look-development passes over a single asset. The same measured build, shown at every stage.
Or start here
Tell us what the project needs
Tick the services your job actually requires, one source or the whole pipeline and send it. We come back with a scope, not a brochure.
Before the shoot
Virtual scouting
The location, solved before anyone travels. We study the site and build a 3D map of the shoot. That map tells you what the job actually needs and it exists before a single day is booked.
A 3D site map you can move through, with sun path, sightlines, distances and access drawn on it.
Crew size, equipment list and shooting days — decided against the real terrain rather than estimated from a satellite screenshot.
Schedule and budget before we start. Not a range that firms up later; the numbers the job is booked on.
A capture crew that arrives sized wrong, or misses a surface it cannot get back to, means a second trip. The site map is what makes the second trip unnecessary.
Same deliverable, four reasons to want it
Who it is for
Visual effects
Sightlines and sun path resolved before the shoot day. The supervisor arrives knowing which setups are capturable and which are not.
Digital twins
Scope and access confirmed against real terrain before a capture budget is committed to a site nobody has walked.
Architecture
The site in context, at true scale, while design decisions are still cheap to reverse.
Infrastructure
Access routes, clearances and coverage planned against terrain and elevation data, not against a flat map.
Scouting can be engaged on its own. If you only want to know what the job would take, this is a complete piece of work, not a partial one.
On the day
On-set supervision
A supervisor on the floor, on the call sheet. Whatever is not recorded on the day cannot be recovered later.
Our supervisor plans and oversees how every shot is captured, so plates, data and reference arrive VFX-ready. Camera and lens data, measurements, clean plates and reference are logged through the shoot, and problems are resolved on the floor rather than in post.
A named supervisor, for the shoot.
Director and DP, on the day.
Camera, lens, measurements, clean plates.
A capture plan and an on-set log post can work from.
Recorded through the shoot
The on-set log
Acquired on the day
What usually gets captured while we are there
These are capture sources, not a separate service. They belong to Data Capture and are listed here because a shoot day is when most of them are acquired.
Select a source to read what it is.
Data capture
Thirteen sources. One dataset. Buy any of them on its own.
Environments, props and assets recorded from complementary sources at once, producing datasets precise enough to build from and scoped to what the project actually needs. All of the equipment is owned and operated by FICTOR, so a job is scoped by what it needs rather than by what was available to rent. Recorded in seventeen countries.
Select a source to read what it is.
What you receive
A fully integrated, production-ready dataset combining all captured data into one precise source of truth
Scans with textures combined, overlaps resolved, unwanted geometry removed. Cleaned, decimated and denoised.
Scale and orientation held to survey. Survey data lined up with the LiDAR, so the model measures as well as it renders.
Tiles and panoramics registered to the geometry. Undistorted photography lined up with the 3D cameras.
HDRIs processed for lighting, splats built from the aligned capture, colour-accurate calibration across all footage.
Terrain reference — digital elevation data — is ingested from virtual scouting and retopologized under the build. It is a scouting input, not one of the thirteen captured sources.
Ten disciplines
In studio work
Raw capture is only the beginning. A registered dataset is one source of truth every downstream department works from, and an analytical model as much as a visual one. Everything below runs on it.
Captured builds
Work
Two builds, shown pass by pass. Nothing here is a render of an idea — every frame is the same measured capture at a different stage.
Location build · Windward Avenue, Venice, California
A Venice Beach street corner, captured and rebuilt
Ten passes, three camera angles. Step through them.
Column detail · Windward Avenue
One column, all the stages of the data
The same capture carried from raw scan to finished model, in one take.
Window detail · Windward Avenue
The same five stages, on a window bay
Ornament, glazing and frame, measured and rebuilt.
Exterior · Windward Avenue
The whole frontage, same five stages
Arcade, storefronts and street furniture, captured and rebuilt as one block.
Asset build · look development
Game asset Datsun 240Z
One asset, one camera, five passes of the look-development stack.
Who we are
We capture the real world into accurate production-ready digital twins.
FICTOR is a premium digital-twin and visualization studio, founded in Los Angeles, California, and built by veterans of the world's leading visual effects houses. We capture the physical world and rebuild it as production-accurate 3D environments, infrastructure and asset libraries through an Unreal Engine and OpenUSD-native pipeline.
Seven names
FICTOR leadership team
Feature experience · 1998 to 2021
Members of FICTOR's leadership team worked on these productions.
These are features the people who run FICTOR worked on, earned at the studios listed above. They are not FICTOR projects. Trademarks, film titles and imagery are the property of their respective owners and appear solely to illustrate the experience of FICTOR's team.
Where the team has captured
Places where our team captured data in the past
Sites and locations inside these cities. Not whole cities scanned.
Web and mobile
App Development
Copy to come.
Copy to come.
Copy to come.
Copy to come.
The 30-second definition
Digital twins
A digital twin is a precise virtual replica of a real object, place, or system, built from real-world data and updatable as that object changes.
It looks photoreal: a pixel-for-pixel match to the real thing, not an impression of it.
Measurements, dimensions and structure are exact, so the model can be measured as well as looked at.
It updates as the real object changes, from sensor data or from capturing the site again.
Seeing one
Currently visualizing a container terminal
A port planned but not yet built, running as a live twin: every container identified, every move tracked, the whole terminal operating around the clock.
What it is not
Not a photo, not a 3D model
The term gets used loosely. These are the two things it is most often confused with, and what separates them.
Captures one moment, flat and in two dimensions. It cannot be measured, cannot be updated, and cannot be walked through.
A designer's interpretation. Approximate rather than measured, static from the moment it is finished, and under no obligation to match the real world.
Captured from reality. Photoreal and measured, verifiable back to its source, navigable, and able to change as the subject does.
Anatomy
Four stages, every time
Every twin is built through the same pipeline. Cost and quality are both decided in the first two stages.
Acquire reality. LiDAR, drone and ground photogrammetry, camera arrays. The output is a point cloud and a photographic record of the real subject.
Build the geometry. Capture data becomes clean meshes, PBR materials are authored, topology is optimised for real time.
Make it interactive. Loaded into a real-time engine, lit and shaded, so it can be walked through, flown around and measured.
Keep it live. Sensor feeds and a re-capture cadence track change, so the twin stops being a snapshot and becomes a mirror.
Three levels
A digital twin is a spectrum.
Projects buy different levels of fidelity and connection. Naming the level you need is most of scoping the job.
A frozen-in-time photoreal model. Captured once, viewed indefinitely. Marketing visualisation, museum and archival records, a walk-through of a state at one moment.
Reflects the current state. Connected to live data from the real subject, temperature, occupancy, status, motion, and updated continuously to show the now.
Forecasts the future state. A model trained on twin data simulates what has not happened yet: failure modes, capacity ceilings, energy use, stress under load.
Where they are used
Ten markets already buying them
Off-plan sales, design review and permit submissions, with every asset drawn from one master model.
Progress captured against design during construction, then an as-built twin that answers what is where.
Preservation at a precision physical conservation cannot reach, and access for people who cannot travel.
Keynote reveal films, digital sets and campaigns shot from one master twin at every angle and season.
Layout optimisation, bottleneck simulation and operator training against the plant rather than a plan.
Predictive maintenance, outage modelling and public-works planning stakeholders can walk through.
Vehicle and environment twins for configurators, launch campaigns and scenario testing.
Anatomy rebuilt for surgical rehearsal, devices tested against physics-accurate organ models, hospital operations simulated.
Terrain and asset twins used to model storm surge, flood and fire against real elevation data.
One measured product twin feeding every render, animation and interactive configurator a campaign needs.
Start a scope
Select what your project needs
FICTOR can deliver the complete pipeline as one accountable partner, or plug in at a single point. The craft is the same at any size.