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LAIKA’s Brian McLean Talks About 3D Printed Faces for Studio’s New Stop Motion Animation Film

While attending SOLIDWORKS World 2019 in Dallas recently, I learned during my interview with Stratasys that the company’s multi-material J750 3D printer, which offers over 500,000 different color combinations, was the only 3D printer used during production of Missing Link, the latest stop motion animation film from Oregon-based LAIKA. The movie is about Sir Lionel Frost (Hugh Jackman), an investigator of myths and monsters, and the legendary Sasquatch (Zach Galifianakis), better known as Mr. Link, or Susan. Together with Sir Lionel’s old friend Adelina Fortnight (Zoe Saldana), they set out across the globe on a mission to find the long-lost valley of Shangri-la, said to be home to the Yetis…who just might be Mr. Link’s long-lost cousins.

The film takes place all around the world, including London, a ship on the ocean, a logging town in Santa Ana, snowy mountains, and a forest in the Pacific Northwest…which is where I was last week. I was lucky enough to join a group of other journalists on a behind-the-scenes tour of the studio ahead of the film’s release on April 12th. Take a look at the trailer below:

It took LAIKA roughly five years to make Missing Link, which director and writer Chris Butler called its “most ambitious film to date.” It was also the first to feature bespoke facial animation, as the Stratasys J750 was used to create the film’s over 106,000 3D printed faces. Thanks to the “amazing level of nuance” of the characters’ facial expressions, it’s much easier to become emotionally invested in these silicone puppets for a full-length feature film. LAIKA uses Maya to design the 3D printable faces for its stop motion puppets, which easily snap on and off with coded magnets…an ingenious solution for switching the many facial expressions that make up a character.

While on the tour, we had the chance to see plenty of movie magic, and speak to the people responsible for making it happen, including the studio’s head of production, costume designer, creative lead, practical effects director, supervising production designer, and VFX supervisor. The only thing that could have made the day better, at least in my book, was if Hugh Jackman himself had strolled in during the tour…which sadly did not happen.

However, we did get the chance to hear from Brian McLean, LAIKA’s Director of Rapid Prototyping, about the studio’s use of 3D printing to make the faces for its stop motion animation characters. LAIKA is no stranger to Stratasys technology, having worked with its J750 3D printer since 2015, but its 3D printing journey began long before then.

The studio’s first 3D printer, which was used to make the faces for its 2009 film Coraline, was the compact Objet Eden260 from Stratasys, which uses Polyjet technology and has been used to create other stop motion animation projects in the past. This 3D printer jets down liquid resin and liquid support in very fine layers, which are then cured by UV lights.

“The reason why we chose this technology was because it was known for its precision and known for its accuracy, especially those fine feature details,” McLean explained.

Because the Objet Eden260 was a single material system, the faces for Coraline were all 3D printed in white resin and then hand-painted. While McLean said the 3D printer was “amazing,” he noted that it did rather limit the level of sophistication that could be used when painting the characters.

The next logical step was color, which is why LAIKA used 3D Systems’ ZPrinter 650 (now known as the ProJet 660Pro) for its films ParaNorman and The BoxTrolls, as it was the only color 3D printer on the market at the time, though McLean said it “was a bear” to work. The ZPrinter 650 features colored glue in cyan, yellow, and magenta, which is sprayed through an inkjet head onto fine layers of white powder.

Unfortunately, this 3D printer only provided a 60% yield on LAIKA’s 3D printed faces, because the dry powder is exposed to the ambient temperature and humidity in the studio. In McLean’s words, Portland is “rainy as hell,” which means that the powder is absorbing lots of humidity. So any puppet face that’s 3D printed will come out looking different in the winter than it does in the summer, which doesn’t do a lot for consistency. That’s why LAIKA was excited to enter the world of resin color 3D printing.

“We had resin in just black and white, then we had color, but the color was powder. The goal had always been, and the exciting thing was, as soon as we can get colored resin, then we have the best of both worlds – we have the precision and the accuracy and the repeatability, but we can add color,” McLean explained.

LAIKA used the Stratasys Connex3, which wasn’t in the room during the tour, to help create three characters for its 2016 film Kubo and The Two Strings. Unfortunately, it only offered a total of three mixable color options. But then Stratasys came out with the J750, which “gave you the ability to print six colors at once.” LAIKA was actually a beta user for the J750, before immediately purchasing “the first five off the assembly line” once the multi-material system was officially released.

“So long story short, we saw this technology, we thought it was where the industry was going, and we got a few of the printers in,” McLean said.

“The hardware that Stratasys had created was really cool, but the software was really limiting, and we ended up partnering with an independent software developer that allowed us to do this really advanced color placement with resin placement.”

McLean explained that after a conference presentation on The BoxTrolls, a LAIKA employee ended up sitting next to a representative from the far-reaching Fraunhofer research organization, who mentioned the organization’s Cuttlefish advanced slicer software. Fraunhofer’s software, which McLean said “saw through” voxel and resin development, intrigued the studio.

“We take for granted a lot of color technology because of the decades that have gone into color calibration in 2D printing,” McLean said. “We’re very used to being able to see a picture on our computer screen and print it out on our inkjet printer and the colors come out pretty accurate.”

Stratasys was willing to let LAIKA use Cuttlefish with the Connex3 and J750, but when it released the GrabCAD Voxel Print software solution in 2017, its software capabilities were expanded to allow for, among other things, better control of voxel-level colors.

“So we were able to leverage the research that Fraunhofer had done, combine it with the hardware that Stratasys had created, and during the production of ‘Missing Link,’ we were able to produce 3D color printed faces that literally no one else in the world had the sophistication to do.”

The J750 also works fast, as McLean explained that a whole row of unique character faces, with different expressions, can be 3D printed in about an hour and 35 minutes.

“Complexity doesn’t add time to the printing process,” he explained. “The only thing that adds time to the printing process is how tall an object is.”

McLean also showed us the “nightmare fuel” of what was underneath the 3D printed puppet faces, calling the whole set-up “really fancy Mr. Potato Heads.” The faces are more like 3D printed masks with eye holes, while the eyes underneath can be subtly moved with an X-acto knife.

“We will spend anywhere between six months to sometimes even as long as a year designing the character’s head,” McLean said. “And when I say designing the character’s head, I’m not talking about what he looks like, I’m talking about what the audience never sees – the internal components. And the reason we spend so much time is we want to give the animators ultimate control when they’re out on set.

“People have heard that cliche saying – the eyes are the windows to the soul. There’s a tremendous amount of performance and life that the animators are pumping through these characters through the eyes. So we want to make sure that this little mechanism that we’ve created and engineered is going to give them the ultimate control that they need.

“Certain animators will want different tension…some animators want the eyeball to be loose, other animators want the eyeball to be tight. Or they’ll want the lid to be loose, and other ones want it tight. So this [mechanism] you can independently tension the eyelid or the eyeball. Now the thing that’s really crazy about certain eyelids is that this is just a vacu-formed thin sheet of plastic. But when you watch it animate, you can’t tell that that’s just a thin piece of plastic.”

LAIKA needed to find an innovative way to animate both the face and the connecting fur of the character Mr. Link, whom McLean hilariously referred to as “an avocado with a face.” It took the studio over a year to come up with a driver system, which is 3D printed out of strong ABS and has embedded magnets inside, which push and pull the fur of Mr. Link’s head into shapes that match the rest of the face.

By using 3D printing to make the faces, the studio is taking the “normal steps of animation and flipping it on their heads.”

“Normally in animation…the animators will go through, they’ll draw it out, they’ll block out the scene, they’ll get the body movements all defined and the timing just right and the acting, and then the last thing that they do is they add the facial animation on top,” McLean explained. “We’re doing facial animation months before an animator’s even on set with their puppet. Because of our process of needing to animate faces, send them to the printer, print out hundreds and hundreds of faces for a shot, process them, test them, and deliver them, we need months to do that. So when an animator is out on set, they are doing a live action performance with the body, they’re capturing it in real time frame by frame, but the facial animation is already pre-determined and already locked down.”

When asked, McLean said they have thought about 3D printing the puppets themselves, especially as the technology is being slowly adopted throughout the various departments in LAIKA. So we’ll see what comes next for the innovative studio.

Missing Link comes out on April 12th, and I for one can’t wait to buy my ticket…I haven’t even seen it yet and I’m already emotionally invested in these amazing puppets.

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[Images: Sarah Saunders for 3DPrint.com]

3DPrint.com’s Visit to LAIKA Studios: Stratasys J750 3D Printer Put to Work for New Stop Motion Animation Film

Stratasys at SOLIDWORKS World 2019

Not too long ago, I made the trip down to Dallas, Texas to attend SOLIDWORKS World 2019. I had the opportunity to speak with several 3D printing companies while I was there, including Stratasys. Prominently displayed in the booth was the company’s multi-color, multi-material J750 3D printer, which was first introduced two years ago. It offers more than 500,000 different color combinations, so parts and components can be produced in multiple colors and textures for a wide variety of different applications. The printer can also make gradient parts with different flexibility and hardness across the part.

“The J750 is the most realistic printer on the market,” Gina Scala, the Director of Education at Stratasys, told me during the event. “Realism, as you think about that, means something different to a car manufacturer than it does to a surgeon planning their approach, right?

“We have created a tool that allows for that hyper realism to be in the hands of the designers, and allows them to push the limits, to have their prototypes look as close to the real thing as possible.”

Stratasys J750 at SOLIDWORKS World 2019

Then she brought up Oregon-based film studio LAIKA, which has used 3D printing in the creation of characters for several of its stunning stop motion animation movies, such as The Box Trolls, Coraline, ParaNorman, and Kubo and the Two Strings, which was the first film ever nominated at the Academy Awards in both the Animated Feature and Visual Effects categories.

Scala said, “‘Missing Link’ is coming out on April 12th – it’s their new feature length film, and it’s all leveraging the J750 technology.”

Craig Librett, the Senior Public Relations & Public Affairs Manager at Stratasys, chimed in here:

“This is the first time that LAIKA has used entirely the J750 for the entire film. They used to use a combination of different printers and different technologies, but they’re calling the J750 the ‘nirvana’ of what they want in 3D printing.

“It’s a real demonstration of the J750. It’s really a unique case, you know, and it just shows what in other industries can be done with the J750.”

Posing with Mr. Link at SOLIDWORKS World 2019

LAIKA is no stranger to Stratasys technology, having worked with its J750 3D printer since 2015.

“They’re able to control what they want material-wise at the voxel level, at the resolution and the quality that they’re looking for, they’re able to control and input that data into the printer and get out that exact match, that realistic character,” Scala explained.

She explained how LAIKA makes faces for their stop motion characters that can snap on and off, which is an easy solution for switching up the many different facial expressions that make a character, but difficult when it comes to matching colors and small details. The studio also needs to worry about proper lighting, in terms of how bright movie lights will reflect off of a character like the orange Mr. Link of its new movie.

“These are the things that they’re thinking of, right?” Scala said. “It’s not just, hey, here’s a really cool printer, and we have some really cool ideas, let’s print – they’re thinking through all of that, how light hits and is absorbed, and so on. So they’re really excited about this movie, and we’re really excited about this movie.”

Missing Link stars Zoe Saldana, Hugh Jackman, Emma Thompson, and Zach Galifianakis, among others, and is about Sir Lionel Frost (Jackman), an investigator of myths and monsters. However, none of his high-society adventuring cohorts believe the wonders he’s seen, which is why he makes a last-ditch effort to prove that the legendary Sasquatch – a “living remnant of Man’s primitive ancestry,” as IMDB says – actually exists while on a trip to America’s Pacific Northwest. He then teams up with said Bigfoot, also known as Mr. Link and Susan (you’ll find out why!), and his old flame Adelina Fortnight, on a globe-trotting adventure to help Mr. Link find his long-lost cousins.

3D printed faces at LAIKA Studios

It just so happens that I was in the Pacific Northwest last week – in Portland, Oregon, to be more precise. I flew across the country, at the invitation of Stratasys and LAIKA, to join a group of other journalists on an exciting behind-the-scenes tour of the studio ahead of its upcoming movie release. The tour went deep into the film-making process and, as Librett told me ahead of time, explored “how LAIKA is exclusively using 3D printing to accelerate this animation journey.”

Once we all got checked in, we were taken to a small screening room to meet with Missing Link producer Arianne Sutner and Chris Butler, who wrote and directed the film. Butler was also the writer and co-director of the studio’s 2012 film ParaNorman.

Mr. Link costume material

“I always want to do different things,” Butler told us in regards to the film being a lot lighter than the last few movies the studio has completed. “I had a selection of projects that I proposed…for my next project, and this was the one that we kind of gravitated towards, and I think that was one of the reasons – that it was this bold, colorful movie that was not like the other stuff we’d done previously.

“There were quite a few elements to this that I think were appealing…that were different, and one of them being the main characters in this are adults, which is not something we’ve done for a long time. There are a lot of little things like that that made it seem like it was something fresh, and that’s what we want to do.”

Missing Link, which took about five years to make, is LAIKA’s “most ambitious film to date,” and was described as a combination of Indiana Jones, Sherlock Holmes, and Around the World in 80 Days, with monsters…definitely sounds like my kind of story. This was the first movie the studio completed where the “facial animation was bespoke,” as the Stratasys J750 helped LAIKA achieve an “amazing level of nuance” for the over 106,000 3D printed faces.

We were then treated to about 26 minutes of footage that the public has not seen yet, along with an extended trailer, before moving on to speak with costume designer Deborah Cook. She talked to us about working with a skilled local weaver to find out what shapes, colors, and threads could be used to trick the camera, and how both the costume and scenery teams were inspired by things like tin ceiling tiles and quilting.

The 25-person costume team was able to “adopt different techniques” in rapid prototyping, such as laser cutting and embossing, to make the costumes. The characters have to bend, so their costumes must be flexible enough to allow this movement, but also be strong enough to remain consistent.

“The more self-sufficient we become, the more we can easily scale up or down,” Cook said.

Cook showed us a fur cloak and then opened it up so we could see all of the mesh, foam rubber, and gauge wires inside.

“Underneath is a lot of engineering,” she explained. “So all of the costumes have something like this within them…so that we can capture them for every 24 of those frames a second. We can move this jacket to be still, and then move it back again, so each incremental moment will build up that fluidity of movement.”

Armature and sculpt of Mr. Link puppet

Next up was puppets with creative lead John Craney, who told us that the 86 people on the team were from a variety of different backgrounds, such as jewelers, illustrators, and “art school rejects.” Nine months of development go into making a stage-ready stop motion animation puppet, and Craney said that it was “a very exciting proposition” to create the robust, furry character of Mr. Link.

Once the puppet team goes through all of the scripts and story boards to get a feel for the film, they then get to see the 2D images of the characters created by Butler and his design team. A veteran concept sculptor, who’s worked on every LAIKA film since Coraline, interprets these 2D turnarounds in order to “reinforce and communicate the character” and its personality. Once the sculpture is approved by the director, the puppet creative team gets to work.

“This helps us with scale…but we also look to anything that might be problematic,” Craney said about the sculpt of Mr. Link. “We look to anything that might compromise the performance of this character.”

John Craney positioning Mr. Link puppet

The armature, or Terminator as I wrote in my notes, of the puppet consists of over 250 components made out of unbreakable climbing resin, while the puppets themselves are silicone. Craney noted that since Mr. Link is somewhat human, the team can break down the puppet and its movements in the same way, including the use of ball and socket joints and a swiveling forearm.

“He’s really something,” Craney said about the Mr. Link puppet.

After the puppet demonstration, Brian McLean, LAIKA’s Director of Rapid Prototyping, spoke to our small group about the studio’s use of 3D printing to make the faces for the stop motion animation characters. While I’ll go into more detail on this discussion later, I will note that the studio has been using 3D printing for quite some time, including a color ZPrinter 650 for ParaNorman and the compact Objet Eden260 for the faces in Coraline.

LAIKA entered the world of resin color 3D printing with the Connex3, though it wasn’t in the room at the moment, and was actually a beta user for the J750, before immediately purchasing “the first five off the assembly line” once the multi-material system was officially released.

“They’re kind of like really fancy Mr. Potato Heads in a way,” McLean said about the puppets with their 3D printed faces. “During shooting, if an ear gets cracked or if an ear breaks, we can go in there and surgically, while we’re on set, it’s like the game Operation, we’ll go in there surgically and unscrew the ear and put another one on.”

Ollie Jones, the Head of Rigging, explained to us how everything in a stop motion animation film that moves requires a rig.

“Because of the stop motion process, a puppet cannot leave the ground without some kind of assist,” Jones said. “Mr. Link was a good example of being a top-heavy puppet…weighed nearly six pounds. So when he’s walking on his toes, he always needs an assist.”

Ollie Jones moving an XYZ rig

XYZ rigs, which Jones said are something like “a mechanical Etch A Sketch,” help the animators position the puppets “grossly in space” in more subtle increments. Rig plugs give the team more freedom in connecting to the puppet without having to physically turn screws inside it. Autodesk Inventor is used to design a lot of the rigging equipment, which is then built in house.

“What’s really great about working at LAIKA is you really get to indulge in the details,” Jones said when showing us the rigging for a moving carriage. “We set up our own unit where we could have some live action tassels. We created an XYZ rig and we bounced the tassels around, and we really studied how they moved and tried to work on how we could reduce that movement to just two simple axes.”

Something interesting I learned from Jones is that when it comes to rigging in stop motion animation, you’re not leaning in to motion so much as you’re actually trying to stop it, so animators can have more control of the characters…or their various body parts. We got to see a 300% scaled up version of Mr. Link’s furry rear end, along with a 600% scaled up version of his mouth, which, coincidentally, features 3D printed teeth and cheeks that were cast from a 3D printed design.

“I think it’s the most axes we’ve ever put on a tongue before,” Jones said, while using the rigging to manipulate the mouth as we all laughed.

Then we took a brief lunch break before heading out with production designer Nelson Lowry on an art and stage tour, which was just fascinating. Lowry is responsible for “the look and feel of the film,” along with the director. To create the film’s multiple turn of the century locations, a lot of time was spent on reference searches, both online and in books at the Library of Congress, and even postcards.

“Chris Butler had a couple of tent-pole descriptions of how he wanted the film to feel,” Lowry said about the director. “He wanted it to be colorful and epic.

“The other thing he liked was Victorian patterning, and very specifically tile work, brickwork, slate roofs, some of the fabrics, wallpaper…all the surfaces have some kind of patterning in them,” he continued. “The other thing that I thought was a strong starting point for the design was Chris’s characters…they’re very stylized.

“That really sets the ground rules for all the design of the film. The environments have to give them a home, basically.”

And what a home they provided! This film takes place all around the world – 60 unique locations, in fact – including London, a forest in the Pacific Northwest, a ship on the ocean, a logging town in Santa Ana, a train, snowy mountains, and the Yeti temple in the valley of Shangri-La. Each set has three main colors, with the exception of the moving train, and while cross-training is currently taking place, Lowry told us that only about 5% of the set pieces were 3D printed; the rest are handmade.

“Someone still has to design it on a computer; it doesn’t really save that much,” he explained.

Our LAIKA host for the day, Dan Pascall, explained that the goal during each week of filming was to create a total of 4.3 seconds of footage by shooting a frame, then shooting it again so the film can be shown in 3D, manipulating the puppets ever so slightly for the next shot, and then doing it all over again. That’s why the sets need to be extremely accessible, so the team can easily get in and out to move the puppets and other scenery around as needed.

While I could have spent hours photographing the various set pieces at LAIKA, we had one more interesting stop before heading out for the day.

We returned to the screening room to meet with with visual effects supervisor Steve Emerson for a brief VFX presentation. Emerson has been with LAIKA for 11 years and has contributed to all five of its stop motion animation films.

Steve Emerson

Obviously, it takes a long time to make one of these movies, especially with the level of detail that LAIKA adds, which is why Emerson said that there’s always an “intense amount of collaboration on set.”

“Our idea was we were going to tell the stories we wanted to tell, without limitations, and we were going to leverage technology in order to do that,” Emerson said. “When we brought technology into the mix, we wanted to do so in a way that would ultimately respect and honor the art of stop motion animation.”

The Missing Link film had a “huge scope,” with lots of props and puppets, and Emerson explained that “VFX helps tell the stories” of the films right along with the other teams. The department mostly uses MAYA software, along with FURNACE, KATANA, MARI, NUKE, OCULA, and Silhouette SFX. There were a total of 1,486 shots in Missing Link, which Emerson referred to as “1,486 little stories,” and 112 million processor hours were logged, through 400 hosts on a 10G network, to create them.

One of the main things VFX is used for in LAIKA’s stop motion animation films is to create set extensions; Missing Link featured 465 of these. 460 shots in the film used digital effects work to create things like snow spray, smoke, and clouds, and the department also cleaned over 1,000 rigs out of the film. In addition, VFX takes care of cosmetics, such as cleaning up “chatter” and the split line on each of the 106,000 3D printed faces where it connects to the puppet itself.

“Whatever we can do to help you forget you’re looking at a puppet,” Emerson said about the department’s work.

I don’t know if I will be able to easily forget this fact when I go see the movie next month, after getting an up close and personal look at all of the hard work that goes into making a LAIKA stop motion animation film. Missing Link comes out on April 12th, and I for one can’t wait to buy my ticket. Take a look at some other pictures I took during my visit to LAIKA below:

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[Images: Sarah Saunders for 3DPrint.com]

3D Printing News Briefs: February 16, 2019

We’ve got business, events, software, and materials news for you in today’s 3D Printing News Briefs. MELD has introduced a new operator training course, and Protolabs is launching a range of secondary services. AMUG announced the keynote speakers for its upcoming conference, while the call has gone out for submissions to the 2019 Altair Enlighten Award. This week at SOLIDWORKS WORLD 2019, Stratasys introduced AdvancedFDM software for GrabCAD Print. Finally, a gold partner at America Makes has created an Ultem 9085 materials database for FDM 3D printing, and 3D MicroPrint is using a powder rheometer to push the limits of additive manufacturing.

MELD Manufacturing Offers Training Program

MELD Manufacturing Corporation is launching a new operator training program to teach participants how to operate its award-winning technology, which uses an innovative no-melt process to additively manufacture, repair, coat, and join metals and metal matrix composites. The 4-day courses will provide both classroom instruction and hands-on machine training, and attendees will also review the history of MELD’s development.

“This program creates certified MELDers and delivers the capacity to integrate and innovate with MELD. Our customers have raved about the elegance of the MELD process and the ease of training. We’re excited to offer more of these opportunities,” said MELD’s CEO Nanci Hardwick.

The size of the classes, which will be held at MELD’s Virginia headquarters, will be limited so that each attendee can have the maximum amount of machine time in order to become certified, so you should register ASAP.

Protolabs Launches Secondary Services in Europe

Protolabs is a digital manufacturing source for custom prototypes and low-volume production parts and offers all sorts of traditional and additive manufacturing services. This week, the company announced that it was introducing detailed measurement and inspection reporting, which will be only the first part of its newly launched in-house Secondary Services across Europe. These services will provide support for the company’s On-Demand manufacturing requirements, and will also help in launching more value-add secondary operations, like assembly and surface treatment, in the future.

“Our customers really value our rapid manufacturing services for low-volume parts and prototypes, but they now want the benefit of On-Demand manufacturing for production parts, which have higher expectations for sampling, measurement and process documentation,” said Stephen Dyson, Protolabs’ Special Operations Manager. “The marked increase from customers across all industries wanting to take advantage of the speed and flexibility of On-Demand manufacturing brings with it a desire to simplify the supply chain. We are offering Secondary Services to reduce the number of process steps that the customer has to manage, saving time and resources.”

Protolabs will hold a webinar for designers and engineers on February 28th as part of its Secondary Services launch.

AMUG Announces Keynote Speakers

L-R: Brian McLean, Brad Keselowski, Todd Grimm

The Additive Manufacturing Users Group (AMUG) recently announced who the keynote speakers will be for its 2019 conference, which will be held in Chicago from March 31st to April 4th. The conference, which will have nearly 200 presentations, workshops and hands-on training sessions, is designed for both novice and experienced additive manufacturing users, and the three keynote speakers will address the use of additive manufacturing in a variety of different applications. Brian McLean, the director of rapid prototype for LAIKA, will take attendees on a visual journey of how 3D printing has helped to redefine stop-motion animation, while NASCAR driver Brad Keselowski, the owner and founder of Keselowski Advanced Manufacturing (KAM), will share how technology such as 3D printing can help companies win the race. Finally, Todd Grimm, the president of T. A. Grimm & Associates, is returning to the conference as a keynote speaker again.

“We are extremely excited about our 2019 AMUG Conference keynote speakers,” said Gary Rabinovitz, the AMUG chairman and chair of its program committee. “They will provide a snapshot of the most transformative ideas shaping the AM industry today.”

2019 Altair Enlighten Award Submissions

Michigan-based technology company Altair, together with the Center for Automotive Research (CAR), are now taking submissions from around the world for the 2019 Enlighten Award, which is the only award from the automotive industry for dedicated lightweighting. The award will be presented in the categories of Full Vehicle, Module, Enabling Technology and The Future of Lightweighting, and winners will be recognized during the CAR Management Briefing Seminars (MBS), along with getting the chance to ring the Nasdaq stock market opening bell in New York. Suppliers and manufacturers can learn more about the criteria and submit an entry for the awards here.

“We are pleased to continue our collaboration with Altair because of their global leadership in solutions that produce the optimal balance between weight, performance and cost. This award helps drive innovation in lightweighting, which is critical to the success of e-mobility solutions,” said Carla Bailo, the President and CEO of CAR. “We can’t wait to see the key contributions the 2019 nominations will bring in new approaches to automotive engineering and design, contributing to further reductions in weight, fuel consumption, and emissions.”

Stratasys Announces AdvancedFDM Software for GrabCAD

At this week’s SOLIDWORKS World 2019 in Dallas, Stratasys introduced a new feature for its GrabCAD Print software that will remove more complexity from the design-to-3D print process. Advanced FDM will use intuitive model interaction to deliver lightweight yet strong and purpose-built parts to ensure design intent, and is available now via download with GrabCAD Print from versions 1.24 on up. The software feature will help users avoid long, frustrating CAD to STL conversions, so they can work in high fidelity and ramp up parts production, and it also features CAD-native build controls, so no one needs to manually generate complex toolpaths. Advanced FDM can automatically control build attributes, as well as calculate 3D print toolpaths, in order to streamline the process.

“For design and manufacturing engineers, one of the most frustrating processes is ‘dumbing down’ a CAD file to STL format – only to require subsequent re-injection of design intent into the STL printing process. This software is engineered to do away with this complexity, letting designers reduce iterations and design cycles – getting to a high-quality, realistic prototype and final part faster than ever before,” said Mark Walker, Lead Software Product Manager at Stratasys.

America Makes Ultem 9085 FDM Properties in Database

America Makes has announced that its gold-level member, Rapid Prototype + Manufacturing LLC. (rp+m), has created and delivered a complete, qualified database of material properties for the FDM 3D printing of high-performance ULTEM 9085 thermoplastic resin. This comprehensive database, which features processing parameters and both mechanical physical properties, was released to America Makes, and the rest of its membership community, in order to ensure the widespread use of the Type I certified material for 3D printed interior aircraft components. The database is available to the community through the America Makes Digital Storefront.

“The qualification of the ULTEM 9085 material and the establishment of the material properties database by the rp+m-led team are huge steps forward for AM, particularly within the aerospace and defense industries. On behalf of all of us at America Makes, I want to commend rp+m and its team for enabling the broad dissemination of the collective knowledge of ULTEM 9085 for the innovation of future part design,” said Rob Gorham, the Executive Director of America Makes. “The ability to use AM to produce parts with repeatable characteristics and consistent quality for certifiable manufacturing is a key factor to the increased adoption of AM within the multi-billion dollar aircraft interior parts segment.”

3D MicroPrint Identifying Ultra-Fine 3D Printing Powders

Additive Manufacturing Powder Samples

Germany company 3D MicroPrint uses 3D printing to produce complex metal parts on the micro-scale with its Micro Laser Sintering (MLS) technology, and announced that it is using the FT4 Powder Rheometer from UK-based Freeman Technology, which has over 15 years of experience in powder characterization and flow, in order to push the technology to its limits by identifying ultra-fine metal powders that will process efficiently. The system can differentiate raw powder materials, less than five microns in size, with the kinds of superior flow characteristics that are needed to produce accurate components using 3D MicroPrint’s Micro Laser Sintering (MLS) technology.

“With MLS we are essentially pushing standard AM towards its performance limits. To achieve precise control at the micro scale we spread powders in layers just a few microns thick before selectively fusing areas of the powder bed with a highly focused laser beam. The ultra-fine powders required typically behave quite differently to powders of > 25µm particle size,” explained Joachim Goebner, the CEO at 3D MicroPrint. “We therefore rely on the FT4 Powder Rheometer to identify materials which will perform effectively with our machines, with specified process parameters. Before we had the instrument selecting a suitable powder was essentially a matter of trial and error, a far less efficient approach.”

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