Let’s hope, then, that LAIKA is able to wring ever greater value out of their suite of Autodesk’s amazing industrial applications, and that they’re able to keep on making their simply astonishing-and yes, very cool-art for a long time to come.Where Disney used to be the home for creating and pushing the boundaries of hand drawn animation, there is only one studio around today that drives the art of stop-motion animation to new levels. We wind up helping each other a great deal.” In the end, we have to make a product that satisfies our customers too. We deal with a lot of the same kinds of problems as manufacturers. “Steve and I both come from animation and digital effect backgrounds. “It’s been a journey for our group,” explained Stringer. It was fascinating to me that tools so routinely used in my manufacturing world could apply so well in the moviemaking environment. We bring together the best of everything. We can use information from the physical world, feed it back to the model, and have the digital then improve the physical. “It comes down to creativity and convergence: combining the digital and the physical. “Creativity is what we’re about,” offered Haley. It comes down to experience to pull it off, and they’ve been around since the Coraline days.” There’s a sense of the impossible at the start of these films. “We couldn’t do what we do without the expertise of companies like Autodesk,” Emerson said. “Their work has lots of moving parts-literally! If we can solve for LAIKA’s schedule, we can solve for anything,” Fischler added.Īs LAIKA forges ahead with the ongoing work on its next magical stop-motion cinematic offering, a central part of their efforts will be further leveraging those digital tools that have delivered so well for them on their previous films. “But we don’t want to have to work fast-we want to take our time with each step, and deliver everything as it’s needed just in time to the stage.” “Our films have so much complexity I’d never seen before,” he said. “That means budgets are always a challenge, so we attack time.” “Our films are constantly increasing in the scope of story-telling,” Emerson said. Perhaps the most important Autodesk tool for LAIKA, though, is Shotgun, their project management software. Inventor enables the designers to evaluate what’s needed for a given puppet, and whether modular components (balls, sockets, joints, and the like) from LAIKA’s standard catalog will suffice, or whether custom elements will need to be designed and fabricated. “You have to have super-tight tolerances, because any slop in the movement will show up onscreen,” said Fischler. The construction of the armatures is critical. We have Haas and a Mazak CNC machines, as well as a laser cutter and a water-jet cutter.” “All the armatures are made in-house in our machine shop. “LAIKA uses Inventor to design the armatures that allow the animators to pose the puppets,” Stringer explained. Moving the puppets relies on another Autodesk tool, Inventor, which is used for 3D mechanical design. #Laika experience how to#“Maya has been around since 1998, so we can count on it, and there’s tons of talent out there who know how to use it.” “When you’re making an animated film, there are thousands of problems that will happen,” Emerson said. Maya is also used for digital visual effects, so it’s critical for all elements of production. In the end we printed 106,000 bespoke faces.” We had eight printers running 24 hours a day making 2,000 faces a week. “For Missing Link, we used Stratasys J750 color printers. Rapid technology advances have made a big difference since then. “For Coraline, with the Stratasys polyjet printers we had back then, we could only print in one color, so the faces were all painted by hand,” said Jeff Stringer, Head of Production Technology at LAIKA. #Laika experience software#Using Autodesk’s 3D computer animation, modeling, simulation and rendering software Maya, they design thousands of different facial expressions and print them. That takes creating empathy, and since the characters’ faces are their main focus, our use of 3D printing becomes so important.”īecause of that need to create “living” and likeable characters, they’ve used 3D printing for puppet faces in all their movies. “People want to go to the movies and be moved. #Laika experience full#“A lot of what we’re doing is realizing the full potential of stop-motion animation, and telling stories nobody else can,” said Steve Emerson, VFX Supervisor at LAIKA.
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