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 studio’s artists. The software estimates how color and translucency will appear in a PolyJet print before the part is produced, with the goal of a predictable match between a digital design and the physical object.
Previewing 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 tool has the potential to give artists predictive previews in those lighting conditions and support faster iteration when developing assets for full-color 3D printing. He added that reliable, fast renders could significantly reduce development time.
The studio prints hundreds of thousands of detailed faces for every film, so each mismatch between screen and printed part can mean another print and affect both production time and quality assurance. Initial projections indicate that the visualizations could lower the number of print iterations and increase artist satisfaction through quicker feedback.
Trial and production criteria
A seven-month trial against production criteria forms part of the arrangement. It targets a predictable match between on-screen designs and printed parts. 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.
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 October 23. The studio said it selected PrismSlicer with future productions in mind.
Research roots and earlier color-matching work
Additive Appearance is a spin-off of Charles University in Prague, and its team is made up of engineers and researchers. The LAIKA partnership builds on years of joint development and material research with the university’s Computer Graphics Group. That work addresses the optical measurement of materials used in PolyJet 3D printing and the precise matching of 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.
LAIKA has worked on appearance fidelity in PolyJet printing before. For Missing Link, it combined Stratasys J750 printers with the Cuttlefish 3D printer driver from Fraunhofer IGD 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 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. Both approaches target the distance between intended and printed color on PolyJet hardware. Pantone standardizes color selection against a reference, while PrismSlicer renders how a specific model will look once printed.
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. With PrismSlicer, LAIKA adds a simulation step before printing to a face production process that has previously drawn on specialized appearance software.