Sony Pictures upcoming “The Pirates! Band of Misfits” still uses molding clay and traditional stop-motion animation to bring its wide-eyed characters to life, but creator Aardman Animations happily embraced a strange new technology to make those figures speak: 3D printers.
A 3D printer is much like an ordinary one, but it works in a third dimension, depositing a substance that eventually builds up, layer by layer, into an object — a ball, a model airplane, or an animated critter.
“We built about 8,000 mouths,” key animator Ian Whitlock said, explaining how he brought the various characters to life in an unusually short time. “For the Pirate Captain model, we made 257 separate mouths. For someone like Charles Darwin, we probably had about 130 mouths.”
A 3D printer connects to a computer and receives a file that describes an object in three dimensions, explained Rich Brown, senior editor at cnet.com. “It works much like a 2D printer,” he said. “The layers build up in liquid form. The material solidifies as it prints out each layer, and the end result is a 3D object in real life.”
The 3D printing of all those different mouths helped speed up the animation process, allowing for more details and characters in the film.“ We’d still be shooting now if we had to sculpt all of these mouths,” Whitlock said. “Even with 3D printing, you can easily spend two to three months on a character. I probably did five or six characters in the space of 10 months.”
The film’s animators broke down the mouth shapes of the characters by listening to an actor’s dialogue. “That would be broken down onto a ‘dope sheet,’ which is a phonetic breakdown,” Whitlock said. “When the directors were happy with the way the mouths looked, then the files would be sent off to a rapid prototype machine, which would then physically print the mouths out.
“When the mouths are printed out, they’re sort of a flesh color. It’s the same technology used to create hearing aides. They have about 14 different skin tones … once it’s done, we sand it and paint it.”
Whitlock said “The Pirates!” is the first animated film to widely embrace 3D printing, although the 2009 film “Coraline” used a similar technique on a smaller scale.
Continues at: Tech And The Movies: 3D Printing Brings New Angle To Animation | Fox News.
