NFL Digital Twins

2025

Our Journey Bringing the NFL Star to Life

At Digito, we’ve had the chance to work on many digital human projects — but recreating a lifelike digital double of CJ Stroud, one of the NFL’s brightest young stars, was a special kind of challenge.

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About the project

We were brought on board to take an initial scan of CJ and push it to the next level: crafting a photoreal digital twin that could perform under the intense scrutiny of ultra-high resolution renders. With just a raw scan as our starting point, our team handled every detail of the transformation — modeling, grooming, texturing, shading, and lighting — with precision and artistry.

From Scan to Sculpture

The project began with a high-quality full-body scan of CJ Stroud. While scans are a great base, they’re far from production-ready. Our job was to clean up the mesh, reconstruct missing details, and enhance the fidelity of facial and body features to reflect CJ’s real-life presence and athletic build.

Using Autodesk Maya, we rebuilt and optimized the geometry, making sure it held up under closeups and extreme poses. Particular care went into facial proportions, skin compression zones, and expression-ready topology.

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Results

Photorealism in the Details

For look development, we turned to Arnold for offline rendering. This gave us full control over subsurface scattering, detailed displacement maps, and cinematic lighting. We created custom shaders for skin, eyes, and clothing — dialing in subtle differences in glossiness, roughness, and micro-bump to reflect how light behaves on human skin in different conditions.

Textures were painted and projected in high resolution to capture every mole, pore, and wrinkle. Hair and stubble were groomed strand by strand to maintain fidelity in both stills and animation.

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