Objective3D | BLOG

The award-winning, stop-motion animation creators at LAIKA make no secret that the thousands of faces used in each film are 3D printed. Animators of such films as “Coraline” and “ParaNorman,” “The Boxtrolls” and “Kubo and the Two Strings,” have counted on the additive technology to provide naturalistic facial animation for the stop-motion puppets that give the films their distinct look and feel. “The idea was to harness the power of the computer and these emerging 3D printing technologies to try to push facial performance, or push a character’s performance into a whole new realm,” said Brian McLean, director of rapid prototype at LAIKA. For more than a decade, the additive technology has been a creative mainstay at LAIKA, ever-evolving with LAIKA’s increasingly ambitious artistic vision and rapid advancements in 3D printing and software. “It’s really kind of an insane process that we’re doing, where we’re taking 3D printing and we’re fusing it with this really old t...

3D Printing is about digital disruption in manufacturing, doing things faster, better, cheaper and leaner. This is the promise that 3D Printing makes, and it's the premise that 3D Printing is built on. It's about customisation, it's about meeting demand as needed, when needed and where needed. The days of any colour you want as long as it is black have gone. It is no longer only about optimising your production line to make the same things faster and cheaper. It is about designing your supply chain to meet the particular needs of the individual consumer or unique business. Businesses used to design products and processes around Personas, groups of people or businesses with similar needs and behaviors. With the advent of big data, this is no longer the case as we can now drill down to the unique needs of just one consumer or one business. 3D Printing provides the ability for companies to use all that information and all that digital knowledge to create a product or a serie...