Under Salt Marsh

A whole Welsh village and a purpose-built set, captured so Milk VFX could flood them on screen.

Client: Milk VFX for Sky Atlantic
With: Sky Atlantic, Milk VFX
Location: Fairbourne, Gwynedd and Dragon Studios, Cardiff

VIDEO · MODEL VIEWER TO FOLLOW

01 · Brief

Milk VFX needed to drown a real village. Under Salt Marsh, Sky Atlantic's six-part crime thriller, turns Fairbourne into the fictional Morfa Halen, cut off by a storm and going under. The live action had to carry invisible CGI seascapes, so Milk needed the whole village as a measured, textured model. They also needed the set at Dragon Studios in Cardiff, built on a concrete pad so the SFX team could flood it for real, then extended in CG. Two captures, one pipeline.

02 · Toolbox

Trimble X9
Leica RTC360
Sony α7R IV
DJI Mavic 3 Classic
Trimble RealWorks
Leica REGISTER 360
Adobe Lightroom
RealityScan

03 · On location

Fairbourne first. A tripod-mounted Trimble X9 at 308 overlapping set-ups through the streets, along the beach and over the sea wall, every scan in full colour so the cloud would lock to the photographs later. 1,342 frames from the ground and 13,700 aerial images from the drones at a range of altitudes. Set-ups registered in RealWorks; every frame balanced to a colour chart in Lightroom. Then Cardiff. The Leica RTC360 at 127 set-ups around the set, 890 frames from tripod-mounted α7R IVs and 1,800 aerial images from a Mavic 3 Classic, registered in REGISTER 360 and through the same image pipeline.

04 · Result

A first-pass model from the aerial imagery alone, so Milk could check coverage within hours of us leaving site. Then the full village from 15,350 selected inputs, scans and photographs aligned together in RealityScan, delivered as OBJ at several resolutions with UDIM textures. The set followed the same route from 3,350 inputs. Milk built the storm on top.

OBJ mesh at multiple resolutions
UDIM texture sets
Registered RGB point cloud

FAIRBOURNE

308

LiDAR scans

1,342

terrestrial images

13,700

aerial images

15,350

inputs to the final model

DRAGON STUDIOS

127

LiDAR scans

890+

terrestrial images

1,800

aerial images

3,350

inputs to the final model

Fairbourne village, rendered from the reconstructed model — Fairbourne, from the model

Fairbourne shoreline, photograph and reconstruction side by side — Shoreline, capture and reconstruction

Trimble X9 laser scanner on the beach at Fairbourne — X9 on the beach

Ambient occlusion render of the Dragon Studios set — Dragon Studios set, clay render

The set's street, photograph and reconstruction side by side — The street, split

The set's square, photograph and reconstruction side by side — The square, split

Two very different sites, one method. A village in the open, exposed to weather and tide, and a set under studio conditions built to be destroyed. Both went through the same chain: scan, photograph, register, balance, align, mesh. Both came back to Milk in formats they could drop straight into the shot.

Totals across the job: 435 scans and 17,732 images.

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