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...