Sep 11, 2014
Mummies, Werewolves, Vampires, and all your favorite creatures of the night will gather together for a stop-motion monster party in the upcoming House of Monsters series.
Built around a 2012 stop-motion short film of the same name, the new House of Monsters web series is a throwback to the classic Rankin/Bass holiday specials like Rudolf the Red Nosed Reindeer and Mad Monster Party. House of Monsters is created by Dawn Brown, a successful Hollywood concept artist, whose credits include Alice in Wonderland, Pirates of the Caribbean, and The Hunger Games movies. When Brown was developing new character designs for the House of Monsters Kickstarter campaign, she turned to veteran concept artist Warren Manser. Manser's credits include Man of Steel, Transformers: Dark of the Moon, and Thor.
The series follows mummies, werewolves, vampires and friends through their adventures in an ominous castle perched over a fearful village. In March 2014, Brown has turned to the popular crowdfunding site Kickstarter to raise funds to initiate production of the series. "We felt that Kickstarter would be a great way to get people involved and be a part of the filmmaking process from the very beginning."
The project has successfully raised more than $20,000 from 271 backers in April, allowing the team to begin production of the first episode of the series. To saving the cost, 3D printing is used to create replacement faces for stop motion animation. Replacement animation simply means swapping fractionally different sculptures one after another to create the illusion of fluid change. Here, Brown's team is using a combination of foam latex and silicone and 3D printed replacement faces to push the quality of this production to the best it can be.
For small studio, affordable 3D printer is certainly the best tool to produce the heads and replacement faces used in the animation.
Manser has been hard at work developing the 3D files for the puppet heads since then. He developed these characters in Photoshop, then built the 3D models of them in Z Brush, and saved each facial expression as a separate model. The faces or parts of the faces are sculpted into fixed expressions. The model is then imported into a printer software, where it figures out how much time and materials are required for the print.
Right before its Kickstarter campaign, the team ordered a Form 1+ 3D printer from Formlabs which uses stereolithography (SLA) technology to achieve a professional print quality that plastic extrusion printers just can't match.
"We had these (test prints) printed by a vendor. They did a great job, but were very expensive." explained Brown. "Switching from artist hat to producer hat, it quickly became clear that printing every expression for every character would be ridiculously cost prohibitive."
"After some deliberation, we bought our own 3D printer. YEAH! Although it was a steep chunk of change, it was definitely a better alternative to using a vendor."
The SLA printer directs a laser across a tray of liquid resin and causes a thin layer to solidify. While the vast majority of desktop plastic extrusion machines lack the finish and resolution for professional-grade output, the SLA system is able to create every facial expression in fine detail. In just some hours, the 3D printed pieces are ready for painting. The faces can then be attached in place with magnets and swapped out from frame to frame to create the character's performance.
The series is set to premiere on Amazon.com early next year. Check out Dawn Brown's new behind the scenes video below.
Posted in 3D Printing Applications
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Nice Approach... Thanks for sharing...
O'LL School Bizza wrote at 9/14/2014 3:10:16 PM:
actually. this is not a new way of doing stop motion. It was done in 1998 and Maya and then to Alias and then to a CNC milling workstation in New York. A little curious and the company was Curious Pictures. I know this as a fact. Why. I was the CG artist that did that a long time ago. Just for the journalist in me to get the facts right. I know what it means to get a story out there and make the people out there look like they are pioneers. They are not as well as FormLabs.
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