BUSHMAN HALO PRO

The capturing of this attic was part of a test, using the Halo Pro lights from Bushman Panoramic. Captured as part of Gotikstrasse project with JeanClaude Grieco from Fotomento.

– Cosmin –

Full transparency: the Bracket 35 and two HALO PRO lights were provided to us by Bushman Panoramic for real-world testing as part of this collaboration. This is not a paid endorsement. It is our honest experience after using the equipment in an actual heritage-scanning project.

As part of THE LAB section, this will be the place where MADCHAMO will share honest equipment reviews, first tries, experiments and workflow tests. Basically its the place where we show things that didn’t work as expected.

Even if others choose to publish only the best of their work, we want to show not only that, but also our experiments. So everybody can learn from it.

So, let’s dive into the HALO PRO and BRACKET 35 workflow for capturing pitch black spaces.

For high-quality photogrammetry, darkness is not exactly a creative mood.

It means building a reliable, consistent lighting setup from scratch, while keeping it mobile enough to work in a space that does not particularly want to be scanned. Getting the balance between usable illumination, flexibility and a clean workflow was still proving stubborn.

Then came 3DISE in Prague.

While walking through the conference, we stumbled across Bushman Panoramic and started talking with Gerald Blondy about exactly this kind of problem.

It was one of those wonderfully suspicious “right place, right time” moments: we had a very dark environment to scan; they had a camera-mounted lighting system designed to bring light precisely where the camera goes.

So, naturally, we had to put the HALO Pro lights and Bracket 35 to work together with the Portal Cam from Xgrids.

Getting our hands on the HALO PRO lights feels just right. They are very, but very well built. Robust materials, well thought design and usability.

One thing that we liked about the bracket is its flexibility. You can use it with so many other camera accessories. You can literally combine SmallRig gear with the bracket as it has many mounting holes.

Carrying this mount with the portal cam attached on it was a bit heavy to be honest. But the bracket wasn’t the issue, cause its built with a very light but durable frame.

The weight came from the two HALO PRO lights that we used. They are quite heavy and we had to switch between us when we were scanning, carefully not be in front of the scanner. (it was tricky, but we are used to it after so many scans together).

Scanning process was a breeze, all worked as expected. The illumination produced with two such lights was pretty impressive.

BUT, as our test was built around the XGRIDS PortalCam and Gaussian Splatting, in a genuinely dark heritage environment, the goal is not simply to make the scene visible. The captured imagery needs to remain stable, evenly exposed and rich in reliable surface detail from frame to frame.

The issue was the constant change of lighting and movement of shadows as we were scanning the attic.

This is where the experiment with this setup was a challenge. When the PortalCam moved close to surfaces, especially the floor, the lights could create strong local overexposure. The closer the rig gets to a surface, the more rapidly illumination rises.

That is simply the physics of having powerful lights mounted close to the scanner. The floor was particularly sensitive, with bright hotspots and clipped areas appearing in the capture. This caused massive artefacts.

For Gaussian Splatting, clipped highlights are more than a cosmetic issue. Once a surface loses texture and tonal information to overexposure, the reconstruction has less reliable visual detail to match across frames.

Add reflections, uneven brightness and changing highlight patterns while moving through the scene, and the result can be unstable surface reconstruction, floating artefacts or areas that do not resolve as cleanly as they should.

 

To be clear: this is not a verdict on the HALO PRO as a 360° light.

It is a limitation we encountered with this particular combination of powerful, camera-mounted lighting, close-range scanning and the PortalCam Gaussian Splatting workflow.

A rig that is excellent for illuminating a dark room can still be too aggressive when the scanner gets very close to the subject and changing light & shadows between frames.

The uncomfortable part: price

We understand the position of the HALO PRO and Bracket 35 as professional equipment. The materials, engineering, fit and finish are all visibly above the usual accessory-grade standard.

You are paying for a purpose-built system, not two generic lights attached to a bracket and held together.

For our PortalCam Gaussian Splatting workflow, the equipment combination in a very dark room has proven to be challenging and we need to experiment more. Its power becomes a challenge in close-range capture, where overexposure can remove exactly the surface information the reconstruction needs.

But for stationary illumination of environment, the BUSHMAN delivers an exceptionally solution and equipment!

VERDICT

The Bushman Panoramic HALO PRO and Bracket 35 are genuinely impressive pieces of equipment. The build quality is excellent, the design details are well considered and the rig is one of the cleanest solutions we have used for bringing controlled light into dark 360° environments. Don’t want to quote Tina Turner here, but it’s simply the best.

A genuine thank you to Lida Svabkova, Gerald Blondy and the entire Bushman Panoramic team. They took a chance on a very specific, very dark and slightly unreasonable scanning problem and gave us access to a setup we simply could not have afforded otherwise.

Did it deliver the exact Gaussian Splatting result we were aiming for with the XGRIDS PortalCam? Yes, but getting there was more challenging than expected.

In the pitch-black attic, close-range capture introduced some strong overexposure and constantly shifting shadows. For Gaussian Splatting, where consistent surface detail across frames matters enormously, this made the workflow more delicate and required extra care throughout the capture and processing stages.

The setup absolutely made the project possible and helped us deliver the final asset. At the same time, it gave us valuable insight into how powerful, camera-mounted lighting needs to be adapted for demanding close-range scanning environments.

At MADCHAMO, we believe good collaborations should leave room for straight, honest communication. This is our principle. We can be grateful for the opportunity (in this case, fate was a little bit involved too), impressed by the engineering and still be clear about where a tool did not fully match our workflow. The HALO PRO and Bracket 35 are exceptionally well-made tools, and they made this capture possible. For our particular PortalCam Gaussian Splatting pipeline, however, they are not yet a perfect one-size-fits-all solution.

That is not a negative ending. It is simply the useful part of testing equipment in the real world where old buildings, dusty floors, physics and even bats are usually less cooperative. We are really looking forward to putting the Bushman setup through more real-world adventures in the future.

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