LAIKA has signed an agreement with Prague-based software developer Additive Appearance to add its PrismSlicer renderer to the 3D printing tools available to the stop-motion studio's artists. The software estimates how color and translucency will look in a PolyJet print before the part is produced, with the goal of a predictable match between a digital design and the physical object.
The agreement addresses a recurring problem in full-color 3D printing: what appears on screen does not always translate to the printed part, and each mismatch can mean another print. LAIKA prints hundreds of thousands of detailed faces for every film, so reducing those extra rounds affects both production time and quality assurance.
Simulating appearance before printing
PrismSlicer generates an initial preview of a model's color, translucency and surface appearance before printing, including under LAIKA's custom studio lighting environments. The aim is to reduce the number of print iterations. Robert Ducey, technical supervisor at LAIKA, said the software could give artists predictive previews of their digital designs under the studio's custom lighting and allow faster iteration when developing assets for full-color 3D printing. He added that reliable, fast renders could significantly reduce development time.
Initial projections indicate the visualizations could lower the number of print iterations and raise artist satisfaction through quicker feedback. Those are projections rather than confirmed production results.
Seven-month trial against production criteria
The agreement targets a predictable match between on-screen designs and printed parts. During the seven-month trial, PrismSlicer gained a command-line interface to support automation. Its simulation backend also received new features intended to make the renders more realistic.
Research roots at Charles University
Additive Appearance is a spin-off of Charles University in Prague, and its team is made up of engineers and researchers. The partnership with LAIKA builds on years of joint development and material research with the university's Computer Graphics Group. That work addresses two problems: optically measuring the materials used in PolyJet 3D printing, and precisely matching photographs to renderings. The company says it designs its tools to work with a wide range of hardware platforms and for users across different industries.
Tobias Rittig, chief technology officer at Additive Appearance, said LAIKA's trust validates the company's mission to make 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.
Earlier efforts to match digital color with PolyJet output
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 that 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 approached color mismatch from another direction 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 select colors from a shared reference palette and avoid misinterpretation, which shortens production time. Like PrismSlicer, this 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 adds a simulation step before printing to a face production process that has previously drawn on specialized appearance software. LAIKA, founded in 2005 outside Portland, Oregon, received a Scientific and Technology Oscar in 2016 for its work in 3D printing. Its newest feature, Wildwood, opens on October 23, and the studio said it selected PrismSlicer with future productions in mind.