Integration of advanced renderer enhances creative precision, appearance control, and production efficiency at the acclaimed animation studio.
Additive Appearance and LAIKA, the award-winning stop-motion animation studio known for films such as Coraline and Kubo and the Two Strings, signed an agreement to integrate PrismSlicer into LAIKA’s suite of next generation 3D printing tools for artists.
In preparation for future productions, the studio selected PrismSlicer for its potential to accurately predict color and translucency in PolyJet prints, promising a predictable match between digital visualizations and 3D prints.
Before this announcement, both teams spent seven months defining performance criteria that would ensure the software’s outputs meet the exacting standards of LAIKA’s production pipeline.
What is PrismSlicer?
PrismSlicer enables users to get an initial preview of color, translucency, and surface appearance before printing. This predictive capability has the potential to allow artists to make creative and technical decisions early in the process, speeding up iterative experimentation.
For LAIKA, where hundreds of thousands of intricate faces are 3D printed for each film, the ability to simulate appearance and texture earlier in the development process represents a substantial gain in both efficiency and quality assurance.
“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.”
During the development phase, PrismSlicer received a flexible command-line interface (CLI) allowing for automation and crucial features to the simulation backend that enhance the realism of the previews.
Initial projections indicate that using the new visualizations could reduce print iterations, as well as enhance artist satisfaction by providing faster feedback.
How the collaboration started
The collaboration between Additive Appearance and LAIKA follows years of joint development and material research together with the Computer Graphics Group at Charles University. The teams are tackling challenges related to optical measurement of materials used in PolyJet 3D printing and precise matching of photographs and renderings.
For Tobias Rittig, CTO at Additive Appearance, LAIKA’s trust validates their mission to make full-color 3D printing as predictable and expressive as 2D imaging.
Both teams expect the collaboration to pave the way for further innovations in full-color 3D printing, exploring new opportunities to merge digital and physical workflows in creative production.
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