Stop-motion studio LAIKA has signed an agreement with Prague-based software developer Additive Appearance to add the PrismSlicer renderer to the 3D printing tools available to its artists. The software is designed to estimate how color and translucency will appear in a PolyJet print before the part is produced, with the aim of making the printed object match the digital design more predictably.
The agreement addresses a familiar problem in full-color 3D printing: what appears on a screen does not always carry over to the printed part, and every mismatch can require another print. LAIKA prints hundreds of thousands of detailed faces for each film, so reducing those extra rounds has implications for both production time and quality assurance.
PrismSlicer produces an initial preview of a model’s color, translucency and surface appearance before printing. It can also show the model under LAIKA’s custom studio lighting environments. The goal is to reduce the number of print iterations needed before an artist and the production team settle on a final asset.
Robert Ducey, technical supervisor at LAIKA, said the software has the potential to give artists predictive previews of their digital designs under the studio’s custom lighting. He described reliable, fast renders as a possible way to shorten development time significantly by allowing faster iteration on assets for full-color 3D printing. Initial projections cited in the announcement indicate that the visualizations could lower the number of print iterations and improve artist satisfaction through quicker feedback.
A seven-month trial against production criteria
The collaboration was assessed in a seven-month trial against production criteria. During that period, PrismSlicer gained a command-line interface to support automation, while its simulation backend received new features intended to make renders more realistic. The partnership is focused on a predictable match between on-screen designs and printed parts.
Additive Appearance is a spin-off of Charles University in Prague, and its team consists of engineers and researchers. The company said the LAIKA partnership builds on years of joint development and material research with the university’s Computer Graphics Group. That work has addressed two technical problems: optically measuring the materials used in PolyJet 3D printing and precisely matching photographs to renderings.
Additive Appearance says it designs its tools to work with a wide range of hardware platforms and for users across different industries. Tobias Rittig, the company’s chief technology officer, said that LAIKA’s confidence in the tool supported the company’s goal of making full-color 3D printing as predictable and expressive as 2D imaging. Both teams expect the collaboration to lead to further work in full-color 3D printing, including new ways to combine digital and physical workflows in creative production.
An established color-matching challenge
LAIKA has worked on appearance fidelity in PolyJet printing before. For Missing Link, the studio combined Stratasys J750 printers with the Cuttlefish 3D printer driver from the Fraunhofer Institute for Computer Graphics Research. That setup was used to print more than 106,000 facial expressions. Brian McLean, then LAIKA’s director of rapid prototype, attributed the choice to the software’s color consistency and geometric accuracy.
Cuttlefish is a voxel-based driver that works with multiple printing materials at once and accounts for light dispersion, hue and surface texture when reproducing a model’s appearance in a printed part. The earlier project therefore sits in the same broad gap that PrismSlicer targets, applied to LAIKA’s face production.
Stratasys approached color mismatch from another direction in 2019, when its J735 and J750 PolyJet printers received Pantone validation. The Pantone Matching System was integrated into the printers’ workflow so designers and product developers could select colors from a shared reference palette and avoid misinterpretation, shortening production time. Like PrismSlicer, that effort targets the distance between intended and printed color on PolyJet hardware. Its method, however, standardizes color selection against a reference, whereas PrismSlicer renders how a specific model will look once printed.
With PrismSlicer, LAIKA is adding a simulation step before printing to a face production process that has previously drawn on specialized appearance software. The studio said it selected the tool with future productions in mind. LAIKA was founded in 2005 outside Portland, Oregon, and received a Scientific and Technology Oscar in 2016 for its work in 3D printing. Its newest feature, Wildwood, opens on 23 October.