Sony Pictures’ upcoming “The Pirates! Band of Misfits” still uses molding clay and traditional stop-motion animation to bring its wide-eyed characters to life, but creator Aardman Animations happily embraced a strange new technology to make those figures speak: 3D printers.
A 3D printer is much like an ordinary one, but it works in a third dimension, depositing a substance that eventually builds up, layer by layer, into an object — a ball, a model airplane, or an animated critter.
“We built about 8,000 mouths,” key animator Ian Whitlock said, explaining how he brought the various characters to life in an unusually short time. “For the Pirate Captain model, we made 257 separate mouths. For someone like Charles Darwin, we probably had about 130 mouths.”
A 3D printer connects to a computer and receives a file that describes an object in three dimensions, explained Rich Brown, senior editor at cnet.com.
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