LAIKA has reached an agreement with Prague-based software developer Additive Appearance to make its PrismSlicer renderer available to the stop-motion studio’s artists. The tool is designed to estimate how color and translucency will appear in a PolyJet print before the part is produced, with the aim of bringing digital designs and physical objects closer together.
The arrangement addresses a persistent issue in full-color 3D printing: what appears on a screen does not always match the printed result, and every mismatch can require another print. LAIKA produces hundreds of thousands of detailed faces for each film, so reducing those extra cycles has implications for both production time and quality assurance. The studio said it chose PrismSlicer with future productions in mind.
Previewing appearance under studio lighting
PrismSlicer creates an initial preview of a model’s color, translucency and surface appearance before printing. It can simulate those characteristics under LAIKA’s custom studio lighting environments. The goal is to lower the number of print iterations by giving artists faster feedback on how a digital asset is likely to translate into a physical face.
Robert Ducey, technical supervisor at LAIKA, said the software has the potential to provide predictive previews in the studio’s lighting conditions. According to Ducey, that capability could allow faster iterations when developing assets for full-color 3D printing, and reliable, quick renders could significantly reduce development time. Initial projections indicate that the visualizations could reduce print iterations and improve artist satisfaction through quicker feedback.
Seven-month trial and automation
The agreement follows a seven-month trial against production criteria, focused on achieving a predictable match between on-screen designs and printed parts. During that period, PrismSlicer gained a command-line interface to support automation. Its simulation backend also received new features intended to make renders more realistic.
Additive Appearance is a spin-off of Charles University in Prague, and its team consists of engineers and researchers. The partnership with LAIKA builds on years of joint development and material research conducted with the university’s Computer Graphics Group. That work has addressed two technical problems: optically measuring materials used in PolyJet 3D printing and precisely matching photographs to renderings. The company says its tools are designed for a wide range of hardware platforms and for users in 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. 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.
Prior work on color fidelity
LAIKA has previously worked on appearance fidelity in PolyJet printing. For Missing Link, the studio combined Stratasys J750 printers with the Cuttlefish 3D printer driver from the Fraunhofer Institute for Computer Graphics Research 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 when reproducing a model’s appearance in a printed part.
Stratasys took a different approach to color mismatch in 2019, when its J735 and J750 PolyJet printers received Pantone validation. 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, shortening production time. Like PrismSlicer, that effort targets the distance between intended and printed color on PolyJet hardware. Its method, however, standardizes color selection against a reference, while PrismSlicer renders how a specific model will look once printed.
With PrismSlicer, LAIKA is adding a simulation step before printing to a face-production process that has previously relied on specialized appearance software. The agreement points to a narrower, practical goal: giving artists a clearer view of the printed result before committing a design to production.