{"id":890,"date":"2019-12-12T15:23:02","date_gmt":"2019-12-12T15:23:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.danielparente.net\/en\/2019\/12\/12\/new-3d-printing-tech-was-key-for-laikas-latest-movie-missing-link-variety\/"},"modified":"2019-12-12T15:23:02","modified_gmt":"2019-12-12T15:23:02","slug":"new-3d-printing-tech-was-key-for-laikas-latest-movie-missing-link-variety","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.danielparente.net\/en\/2019\/12\/12\/new-3d-printing-tech-was-key-for-laikas-latest-movie-missing-link-variety\/","title":{"rendered":"New 3D-Printing Tech Was Key for Laika\u2019s Latest movie, \u2018Missing Link\u2019 \u2013 Variety"},"content":{"rendered":"

[ad_1]
\n
<\/p>\n

\n

For the upcoming animated comedy adventure \u201cMissing Link<\/a>,\u201d stop-motion studio Laika<\/a> set the bar very high. To execute the designs created by director and writer Chris Butler, artists would have to speed up their 3D printing of character faces \u2014 and those faces would have to be the most complex they\u2019d ever created.<\/p>\n

\u201cMissing Link<\/a>\u201d centers on Sir Lionel Frost (voiced by Hugh Jackman<\/a>), a self-styled investigator of myths and monsters whose skill is not acknowledged by his small-minded high-society peers. So Frost travels to the Pacific Northwest to prove the existence of the legendary Missing Link (voiced by Zach Galifianakis<\/a>). Other voice actors include Zoe Saldana<\/a>, Timothy Olyphant and Emma Thompson.<\/p>\n

Laika<\/a>, based in Portland, Ore., brought to \u201cLink\u201d its signature handcrafted stop-motion animation, which it couldn\u2019t have developed without the speed of 3D-printing technology. While the concepts of hand crafting and digital printing may seem at odds with each other, their combination is the main ingredient of Laika\u2019s creative secret sauce.<\/p>\n

The studio began the process of 3D printing of faces to painstakingly fashion expressions for the stop-motion characters in 2009\u2019s \u201cCoraline.\u201d That project was completed with about 20,000 unique faces. For 2016\u2019s \u201cKubo and the Two Strings\u201d the number of expressions jumped to 64,000. \u201cMissing Link,\u201d to be released April 12, will feature a whopping 106,000.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn the past, a lot of our process was based on reusing facial expressions,\u201d says Brian McLean, director of rapid prototyping at Laika. \u201cNow, with this technology and everything that we\u2019ve learned, we\u2019ve gotten to the point where we actually could be producing shot-specific animation.\u201d<\/p>\n

The process requires several steps, notes McLean. \u201cA CG animator sits at a computer working in Maya [software], listening to a line of dialogue that the director has approved. They\u2019re seeing the storyboards and exactly what the action needs to be, and they\u2019re building a customized facial performance in the computer. It gets sent to editorial, where the director will review it and give specific notes. CG will then go in and change the performance. And when the director approves it, we take that CG performance and we export the geometry to the 3D printer.\u201d<\/p>\n

Even though dialing in the geometry created by a CG artist made it possible to create highly specific expressions, some designs were still hard on the printers \u2014 specifically those for Lionel.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen it came time to try to figure out a way to print Lionel\u2019s nose \u2014 this pointy little triangle \u2014 we knew this technology was not going to suffice,\u201d explains McLean. But Laika had a long relationship with 3D printer manufacturer Stratasys dating back to \u201cCoraline.\u201d \u201cStratasys had just started to play around with color resin, and they let us have a new printer about a year before it was available to the public,\u201d McLean says. \u201cThe hardware was amazing, but the software was pretty limited. So we had to take hardware from one company and software from another.\u201d<\/p>\n

McLean and his team selected Cuttlefish software that could handle the high demands of 3D color printing, and the new cutting-edge printer was able to make Lionel\u2019s nose a reality.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Says McLean of the requirements in meeting both the demands for specialty work and the sheer number of more than 100,000 expressions: \u201cIt\u2019s scary and exciting to get to solve these challenges.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n