LAIKA has added Additive Appearance’s PrismSlicer renderer to its full-color 3D printing toolkit under an agreement intended to give artists a preview of how color and translucency will appear in a PolyJet print before a face is produced. The Prague-based software developer said the goal is a predictable match between a digital design and the physical part.
The stop-motion studio prints hundreds of thousands of detailed faces for each film. In that workflow, a mismatch between an on-screen design and a printed component can require another print, adding time and quality-control work. PrismSlicer is meant to narrow that gap by estimating appearance ahead of production and reducing the number of print iterations.
Preview before printing
PrismSlicer generates an initial preview of a model’s color, translucency and surface appearance before printing. It can also simulate how a design will look under LAIKA’s custom studio lighting environments. Robert Ducey, technical supervisor at LAIKA, said the software has the potential to give artists predictive previews in those lighting conditions and to allow faster iterations when developing assets for full-color 3D printing. He added that reliable, fast renders could significantly reduce development time.
Additive Appearance’s initial projections indicate that the visualizations could lower the number of print iterations and increase artist satisfaction through quicker feedback. Those are projections, not a confirmed production result. LAIKA said it selected PrismSlicer with future productions in mind; its newest feature, Wildwood, opens on October 23. The studio, founded in 2005 outside Portland, Oregon, received a Scientific and Technology Oscar in 2016 for its work in 3D printing.
Trial and research background
The agreement is tied to a seven-month trial against production criteria. During that period, PrismSlicer gained a command-line interface to support automation, and its simulation backend received new features intended to make renders more realistic. The collaboration is also rooted in research: Additive Appearance is a spin-off of Charles University in Prague, and its team includes engineers and researchers. The partnership builds on years of joint development and material research with the university’s Computer Graphics Group.
That research addresses two technical problems: optically measuring materials used in PolyJet 3D printing and precisely matching photographs to renderings. Additive Appearance said it designs its tools to work with a range of hardware platforms and for users across different industries. Tobias Rittig, the company’s CTO, said LAIKA’s trust validates its mission to make full-color 3D printing as predictable and expressive as 2D imaging. Both teams expect the collaboration to lead to further work, including new ways to combine digital and physical workflows in creative production.
Earlier color-matching efforts
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 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 to reproduce a model’s appearance in the printed part.
Stratasys took a different approach when its J735 and J750 PolyJet printers received Pantone validation in 2019. The Pantone Matching System was integrated into the printers’ workflow so designers and product developers could choose 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, while 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 agreement’s immediate focus is preview quality and iteration speed; broader production effects will depend on how the tool performs in the studio’s workflow.