LAIKA, the stop-motion studio behind Coraline and Kubo and the Two Strings, has agreed to add PrismSlicer, a photorealistic preview tool from Prague startup Additive Appearance, to the 3D printing pipeline it uses to produce character faces for its films.
The studio prints its replacement faces on PolyJet machines, a material jetting process that deposits and cures droplets of colored and clear resin to build parts in full color. Hundreds of thousands of faces go through the process for each film. The catch with full-color 3D printing is that the finished part rarely looks like the file: color shifts, the material is slightly translucent, and the surface finish changes how light falls on it. Until now, the way to find out was to print, look, adjust and print again.
PrismSlicer renders a preview of color, translucency and surface appearance before anything is printed, so an artist can judge a design on screen and change it early. Additive Appearance says it added a command-line interface for automation and new simulation features during a seven-month development phase run against performance criteria set by the studio, and that LAIKA’s custom lighting environments have been built into the previews.
Additive Appearance’s explainer on how PrismSlicer previews full-color prints. (Credit: Additive Appearance)
“PrismSlicer has the potential to give our artists predictive previews of their digital designs in our custom studio lighting environments. This is a crucial advancement in our capabilities that allows for faster iterations when developing assets for full color 3D printing,” said Robert Ducey, Technical Supervisor at LAIKA. “Having reliable, fast renders has the potential to reduce development time significantly.”
“We’re honored to see PrismSlicer become a part of LAIKA’s 3D printing innovation,” said Tobias Rittig, CTO at Additive Appearance. “Their trust validates our mission to make full-color 3D printing as predictable and expressive as 2D imaging.”
Both companies are careful to say “potential.” The press release gives no measured figures on iterations saved; the company’s early projections are that print iterations will fall and that artists will get feedback faster. The tool is being installed for future productions rather than the current one. Wildwood, LAIKA’s sixth feature and its latest showcase of full-color printed faces, reaches theaters on October 23.
The agreement follows several years of joint work between the two companies and the Computer Graphics Group at Charles University on optical measurement of PolyJet materials and on matching renderings to photographs of printed parts. Additive Appearance is a spin-off of the university. LAIKA received a Scientific and Technical Academy Award in 2016 for its use of 3D printing in stop-motion, and all five of its released films have been nominated for the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature. PrismSlicer is sold for full-color UV inkjet printers, with a separate single-material version for resin SLA machines.
Source: appearan.cz
