ParaNorman, Powered by 3D Printing

Stop-motion animation has given us King Kong, Jack Skellington in The Nightmare Before Christmas, the AT-ATs in The Empire Strikes Back, and others. But compared with the puppets in ParaNorman, out August 17, those characters are primitive. LAIKA, the studio that created ParaNorman, blended old-school methods with 3D rapid prototyping, which prints an object layer by layer, to build more expressive puppets. The result is a film that looks more like animation than stop-motion.

LAIKA?s first step is to create a pen-and-paper character sketch. Next, they sculpt those characters in clay and make a mold to create a maquette, or model. The animators place a metal skeleton armature inside the body, which will allow them to manipulate the puppet?s movements. They also scan the puppet into a computer. Using a 3D animating program called MAYA, the team goes through a process similar to one on a 3D animated film, says Brian McLean, director of rapid prototype at LAIKA. "What we do differently is that we dive in and start designing and engineering all of the inner components of the heads."

There are two types of heads on stop-motion puppets. The first is mechanical, which has clock gears that control facial movement. "Norman?s head is made up of 78 individually engineered and designed pieces, including an eye rig, which is a little mechanical functioning eyeball and eyelids," McLean says. "At any point in time you see three of those, basically his ears and his face, but it?s all designed to give the animators as much performance as possible."

The second type is called replacement. These heads have faces held on with magnets, so they can be removed and replaced to create a great variety of expressions. "It?s basically like a mask that pops on and off," LAIKA president and CEO Travis Knight says. For ParaNorman, LAIKA used mostly replacement faces, which are traditionally sculpted from clay. "The problem with doing them all by hand is that there are limitations?there are only so many different iterations you can make. You can get a lot of broad, clear expressions, but you can?t get a lot in between, so it ends up being a little clunky."

But rapid prototyping changed all that. Creating ParaNorman?s replacement faces with a color Z-Core 3D printer?the color is a stop-motion animation first?allowed LAIKA to give Norman 8000 different facial expressions. "Some are very subtle, and some are broad in scope," McLean says. "It means that we can take this age-old technique of replacement animation, mix it with a new technology and get unbelievable performances and some really unique designs for stop-action." (LAIKA used a different type of 3D printer to build parts for the mechanisms in the mechanical puppets.) Using a printer that baked color into the faces allowed them to create many details?like thousands of freckles on one character?s face?that would have taken too much time in the days of hand-painting puppets.

The biggest challenge was getting all those heads to come out the same every time. LAIKA?s team used powder material to create the faces, but the material had a lot of inherent slop and didn?t print perfectly during the rapid prototyping process. "The team went through a lot of trial and error to figure out how we can make those things fit in the exact same place every time," Knight says. "The heads are 3 inches big, but magnified on the big screen, any little variance is going to look like it?s shifting all over the place.

The color itself was a struggle. "People take for granted that when you print out a photograph on an Epson or HP printer that the color is pretty much going to match the screen," McLean says. "But the color profiles that you see onscreen and what color the 3D printer actually produced?that communication wasn?t really there." To determine which on-screen color corresponded to what printed color, the team went through a pantone book and printed each individual color to see what it would come out looking like?and that became the color palette for ParaNorman.

But all of that trial and error did lead to some happy surprises. "Sometimes the printer would print two faces on one, and that got us thinking, ?Hey, we can use this to do the standard smears that they used to do in hand-drawn animation to simulate motion blur,??" Knight says. "That gave us the impression of fast motion, and we happened upon it by mistake."

You might think these new techniques would make stop-motion filmmaking faster. But truly, it?s making stop-motion filmmaking bigger. "With each technological advance, it makes things easier, but then it gives us a more expansive vision," Knight says. "We have this new technology and it opens up new creative doors for us, so we push it hard and push it further. Let?s do more, let?s do bigger, let?s do better. So it makes it no quicker or cheaper to do."

Source: http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/digital/visual-effects/paranorman-powered-by-3d-printing-11744926?src=rss

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