Monday 23 January 2012

Aardman 3D-Print 8,000 mouths for Sony Pirates Animation

Aardman Animation studios have employed 3D Printing to produce 8,000 mouths of a Pirate Character for a new movie. You read that right, 8,000!

Traditional molding clay was still used to bring the characters in Sony's new movie "The Pirates! Band of Misfits"  to life, but the animators happily embraced the new technology to make those figures speak.

http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2012/01/21/tech-and-moves-3d-printing-brings-new-angle-to-animation/

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,” key animator Whitlock at Aardman 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 ....You can get stronger individual animation styles to each face because of the way that they're made ....You retain the style very faithfully, so that's very helpful.”

Having read this story, one wonders how many mouths were printed at a time, on what printer and with what process?



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