Oct.23, 2013

Hollywood is changing the way movies are made with 3D printing. In a recent interview in LiveScience, Andrew Clement, the owner of effects shop Creative Character Engineering in Van Nuys, CA, says that his team has been using emerging technologies, including 3D printing, to turn actors into monsters and rubber and silicon into aliens and corpses.

Clement says that 3D printing is "an extremely fast way of sculpting and doing concepts." 3D printing has changed the way Clement does business. Instead of building them from scratch, he can simply sculpt a monster head using a computer program, then make tweaks and print it out.

"On Harry Potter, we had a big old giant spider we did for the last film and we had to build a smaller version of the same thing, so we had it scanned and 3D printed," said Mark Coulier, the director of Coulier Creatures and winner of an Academy Award for his work on 2011's "The Iron Lady." He was also responsible for many of the effects seen in the "Harry Potter" films.

Concepts are the mock-ups shown to moviemakers as a sort of first draft of the effect. 3D printing helps Hollywood creature companies make mock-ups more easily. These concepts are normally created by hand out of a clay material and then shown to the film's directors. Then, if directors need some changes, they have to start over again from scratch. 3D printing could make model-creation cheap and easy - they only have to redesign them in the computer until all the changes have been made.

Clement expects 3D printing to feature more heavily in future films. As printers can handle more materials at once, he said, they may be able to print out an entire monster head, rather than printing out parts for assembly.

Another example is 3D printing's use in the Halo. Jason Lopes, Lead Systems Engineer for Legacy Effects was searching for the right technology to create lifelike models for the Halo TV commercial. He turned to 3D printing and he was impressed by the precision detail and lifelike models that could be produced in such a short time. "I don't think there is any way, besides using technology like this, that we can meet the demands of today's customers." said Lopes.

In the video below, Jason Lopes explains how 3D printing is used to design and create the characters and creatures used in some of the most popular blockbuster films and animations of recent years including Avatar, the Incredible Hulk, Iron Man, John Carter, Terminator, the Halo game and many more.

Posted in 3D Printing Applications

 

 

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sakhile mamba sthembiso swaziland wrote at 2/9/2014 5:09:32 PM:

thats awesome en ridiculous



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