For 2019’s Missing Link, LAIKA 3D printed more than 100,000 unique facial expressions. “Then, instead of hitting render at the end of creating an asset, our animators just hit print.” When a new expression is needed, this custom manufacturing process allows the animators to create a new face in a day. “We use Maya to create thousands of facial expressions,” Emerson says. These individual faces are placed on the puppets, one after the other, to bring the characters to life in the stop-motion animation process. “Those components are soldered together to create the armature and slipped into a nice cozy silicone body sleeve to drive the puppet’s performance.” Altogether, it takes about nine months to manufacture a puppet, from the moment a director approves the digital character design to the animation-ready puppet being carried out to the set.īeginning with Coraline in 2009, LAIKA began using 3D printing to fabricate the expressions for the film’s characters. “In the end, a lot of the armatures are composites of modular and custom components,” Emerson continues. Using Inventor, they look at modular components from our library to see what they’re going to need in terms of things like balls and sockets and joints to create a given armature, or if they need to fabricate something custom or bespoke. “Once it’s approved by the director, it gets handed off to the armature team to create the skeleton in the body of the puppet, which is what lets the animators control and pose it frame by frame. Of course, a production begins with the puppets: “It starts on paper, 2D art,” Emerson says, then the character is translated into a digital sculpt using Maya.
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