Printers, Coming To A Big Screen Near You Soon Aug 01, 2012 15:04 by Matt Bird

3D printing is one of the most spoken about technologies this year, and it’s easy to see why. Whether someone is printing out their own life-sized car, or one of the 5 amazing 3d printing projects, the possibilities for this technology seem endless.

In a recent discussion with animation studio ‘Laika’, Empire magazine discovered how they’re using 3D printers to both speed up, and increase the quality, of their stop-motion filming in their next big release, Paranorman.

The ‘Rapid Prototyping’ Department

Laika studios have invested in state-of-the-art 3D printers to create countless facial expressions for use in the movie. Any digital image they can create is printable which allows designs that simply are not possible with a human hand, no matter how skilled the sculptor.

Empire put this into perspective with an amazing statistic. I’m sure we’ve all seen ‘The Nightmare Before Christmas’… well the lead, Jack Skellington, had a possible 800 facial expressions. Fast forward to their most recent stop-motion animation Coraline, and their Rapid Prototyping department gave their lead character up to 208,000 facial expressions.

At the moment this technology is only being used for characters facial expressions, and fans of classical stop-motion will be pleased to know the ‘army of animators’ involved in the painstaking creation process are still heavily involved.

Involving manual creation of anything from clothes and skeletons, to the scenery and environment; they deserve our admiration for such amazing creativity and detail.

Without people like them, there wouldn’t be things like ‘Wallace and Gromit’… and I don’t know about you, but I wouldn’t survive in a world like that.

To read the entire, fascinating article buy the new edition of Empire, issue 279!