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On day three of the Additive Manufacturing Users Group (AMUG) 2024, Jason Lopes, Director of Additive Manufacturing at Gentle Giant Studios begins his keynote presentation by displaying a quote from seven-time Academy Award-winning special make-up effects creator Rick Baker: “Visiting Gentle Giant Studios is like a cross between Santa’s workshop and Frankenstein’s laboratory.”
Lopes has been with the studio for little over a year, but has decades of experience in the field of creating effects and props for the film and TV industry, with credits on films such as Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Iron Man 3, Life of Pi, Pacific Rim, The Hunger Games, and many more. Lopes previously worked at Legacy Effects from 2008 until 2017, as well as working at Carbon for over five years.
Lopes then spoke about the founder of Gentle Giant Studios, Karl Z. Meyer. He said: “As one of the earliest innovators of 3D scanning, 3D modelling, and 3D printing, Karl and his team revolutionised the entertainment industry by leading the way to a fully digital workflow in the creation of film props, toys and collectibles, facilitating authenticity and accuracy in product development well ahead of the digital revolution that would eventually overtake all media production.”
An early use of 3D scanning at Gentle Giant Studios mentioned in the presentation was in 1999 when Star Wars: The Phantom Menace was being filmed. Lopes says that Lucasfilm wanted to archive props and other elements from the film, and Karl went to the set with a homemade scanning unit with two cameras. Lopes said: “You can imagine people seeing this on set for the first time and going crazy, and it just progresses from there.”
Lopes spoke about Gentle Giant Studios using 3D scanning on the set of Fight Club in the same year: “1999. Fight Club, one of my top 10 movies. The first ever actor to be scanned on set was Edward Norton, and Gentle Giant performed that scan. To make this shot, it's like 180 psi going into the mouth, but Karl was able to make a scan and allow the CG artist to take it and create the special effect for the film.”
The talk then moved onto talking about the first metal 3D print at the studio, a large metal replica of Thanos’ infinity gauntlet from the film Avengers: Infinity War. This was one of Lopes’ first projects that he took on in his role at the studio, and it was completed in three weeks.
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Lopes showed images and gave insight into other recent projects from Gentle Giant Studios, including the creation of 200 Skrull masks to hand out to influencers at the premiere of Marvel’s Secret Invasion, which had to be finished in a short time frame of two weeks; the life-size models of Ember and Wade from the Pixar film Elemental which were present at multiple premieres of the film in different locations; replicas of bassist Tom Hamilton’s finger and ring to give away on the Aerosmith Peace Out tour; and the creation of bronze statues, including one of the late American comedian Bob Hope.
Lopes then spoke about a conversation he had with Karl Meyer after a panel session at the Director’s Guild of America in 2014, which laid the foundation for a big part of what he would work on in his first year at the studio: “He said, hey when we get off this panel I’ve got something to show you, and he took me behind the curtain, and he pulls out a colour 3D print. And he says this is the future, this is where we need to go. It’s not really there yet, but we want to be on the cusp of it when it is ready. That was many many moons ago. At the time I was like, I’m right there with you, but I don’t think there is anything out there that can do it.
“Years go by, I come to Gentle Giant and there is still no colour printer. There’s no colour, it's a world of traditional colour, which I highly respect, we have the best painters in the world, that have been painting for us for around 20 years. We did a lot of R&D, drove a lot of OEMs crazy, but at the end of the day, the work that we were doing, probably around two months of just trying to figure out a workflow, we decided that it was completely evident with their years of colour experience, that we were going with Mimaki.”
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One of the Skrull masks created for the Secret Invasion premiere.
Lopes mentioned that a traditional painter from Gentle Giant, Scott “Beardy” Akers, who had been with the company for years, was brought in to lead the colour R&D, which led to the creation of 3 lanes of colour at Gentle Giant. The first being character IP. Characters at studios such as Disney have a specific colour palette that cannot be varied from. The second lane was imagination, which Lopes said is “whatever you can think of”, and the third lane is photogrammetry, which is colour palettes coming from 3D scans.
Gentle Giant Studios now has specific colour palettes for individual characters across the many IPs and franchises that it works on.
Lopes spoke about a project which involved musician Kid Cudi. Lopes wanted to use the 3D scanning truck that is taken on many film sets to take digital scans of actors for creating models, to try and develop a new workflow for creating 3D printed models from photogrammetry. Hollywood icons such as Tom Hanks, Brad Pitt, were names that were thrown about to be used as “testing subjects” for this new workflow, but due to the SAG-AFTRA strikes in the summer of 2023, they were unavailable. Lopes said that instead, in a move which made his daughter jealous, they worked with Grammy Award-winning musician Kid Cudi.
Cudi was scanned by the hundreds of cameras in the truck, and the images were used to create the workflow. Lopes spoke about how artificial intelligence (AI) was implemented, saying that AI trained processing allows for better sharpening of images, which means better data to be used in the colour 3D printing than would have been available from regular processing.
Lopes showed images of the scans that had been rendered and had a high level of detail, saying: “In between those steps, I can't reveal what's going on, but don't forget I come from a rendering background with a lot of processing power. So we're manipulating data in a very fast way going from one step to the next to the next. Nothing is missing in this picture. Nothing. This is where it's at.
He concluded the talk by saying: “This is our workflow for colour. We are so excited about it.” Before a highlight reel of many of Gentle Giant Studios’ film projects played on the screen to close out the presentation.
Some of the models mentioned during the keynote were on display afterwards, and attracted plenty of attention.
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