Every face in a LAIKA stop-motion film has to look right twice: once on the printer, and again under the studio's lights when the camera rolls. According to 3D Printing Industry, the Oregon studio has signed an agreement with Additive Appearance, a Prague software company spun out of Charles University, to use its PrismSlicer software to estimate how full-color PolyJet prints will look, including their color and translucency, before the part is produced. The agreement came after a seven-month trial, and it arrives just ahead of LAIKA's new feature, Wildwood, which opens on October 23.
For a studio that, per 3D Printing Industry, prints hundreds of thousands of detailed faces for every film, the appeal is simple arithmetic. The report describes a recurring problem in full-color printing: what appears on screen does not always translate to the printed part, and each mismatch can mean another print. Multiply that by a film's worth of faces and the extra rounds affect both production time and quality assurance.
The problem PrismSlicer is built to solve
Full-color material jetting is one of the few additive processes where appearance is the product. The printers deposit droplets of colored and clear resins, which means the final look of a part depends not only on the color values in a texture map but on how light behaves in the stacked materials. A color that reads correctly on a monitor can come out looking different once it is a physical object with some depth of translucent resin behind the surface.
That is the gap Additive Appearance targets. On its own website, the company describes PrismSlicer as full-color software for UV inkjet 3D printers, the material-jetting category it also calls PolyJet. Its headline feature is a photorealistic preview that attempts to show what the finished print will actually look like: printer lines caused by printer resolution, a matte or gloss surface finish, how colors mix, how translucent the part will be, and how it appears under different lighting conditions.
The lighting piece matters most for LAIKA. 3D Printing Industry reports that PrismSlicer generates a preview of a model's color, translucency and surface appearance that includes LAIKA's custom studio lighting environments, with the aim of reducing the number of print iterations. That lets artists judge a face closer to how it will be seen in the studio's own setups, rather than only under a generic view.
Seven months of trial, and what changed
The agreement was not signed off a demo. According to 3D Printing Industry, PrismSlicer went through a seven-month trial, and the software changed during it. Two additions stand out: a command-line interface (CLI) to support automation, and new features in the simulation backend intended to make the renders more realistic.
The CLI is the less glamorous change, but arguably the more telling one. A production studio dealing with this many faces does not want every preview to depend on someone clicking through a graphical interface. A command-line entry point makes it possible to script previews and fold them into an existing pipeline, though the report does not detail how LAIKA uses it.
The improved simulation backend speaks to the core value proposition. A preview is only useful if it is trustworthy; if the render and the physical part disagree, artists fall back on test prints and the software becomes decoration. LAIKA's Technical Supervisor, Robert Ducey, is quoted as saying PrismSlicer "has the potential to give our artists predictive previews of their digital designs in our custom studio lighting environments," and that reliable, fast renders have the potential to reduce development time significantly. The report adds that initial projections indicate the visualizations could lower the number of print iterations and raise artist satisfaction through quicker feedback. These are expectations, not measured results. Tobias Rittig, Additive Appearance's CTO, said the studio's trust validates the company's mission to make full-color 3D printing as predictable and expressive as 2D imaging.
LAIKA's long history with color printing
LAIKA is not new to this. Founded in 2005 outside Portland, Oregon, the studio received a Scientific and Technology Oscar in 2016 for its work in 3D printing. 3D Printing Industry notes that for the earlier film Missing Link, LAIKA combined Stratasys J750 printers with the Cuttlefish 3D printer driver from the Fraunhofer Institute for Computer Graphics Research (Fraunhofer IGD) to print more than 106,000 facial expressions.
That history frames the PrismSlicer deal. Cuttlefish addressed how to drive a multi-material jetting printer to reproduce appearance accurately. PrismSlicer, as described, adds a simulation step before printing: a way to see the predicted result, including under the studio's lighting, before committing printer time and resin. It is the difference between trusting a color pipeline and being able to inspect its output in advance.
Additive Appearance's research roots are also part of the story. The report says the company's team is made up of engineers and researchers, and that the partnership builds on years of joint development and material research with the university's Computer Graphics Group, covering optical measurement of PolyJet materials and matching photographs to renderings.
One caveat on sourcing: the LAIKA agreement is reported by 3D Printing Industry. Additive Appearance's homepage, which FilamentFeed reviewed for product details, does not mention LAIKA. The product capabilities described here come from the vendor's site; the deal details, trial length and quotes come from 3D Printing Industry's report.
Beyond PolyJet: the rest of the lineup
Additive Appearance's catalog reaches past high-end material jetting. Alongside the full-color product, the company lists PrismSlicer SLA, a single-color version aimed at resin printers. It also offers a free Color Picker, described as a recipe calculator for CMYKW resin kits, plus a calibration service for measuring colors and translucency. The company's site also highlights recognition at SIGGRAPH Asia 2025: its paper on scattering-aware color calibration for 3D printers earned an Honorable Mention, a sign that the work has roots in graphics research as well as production use.
What It Means for Makers
Most makers will never touch a PolyJet machine, let alone print a hundred thousand faces. But the LAIKA deal is a useful signal about where color printing software is heading. The hard part of full-color 3D printing is increasingly not only the hardware; it is predicting appearance. Translucency and surface finish are physical effects that a flat color picker ignores, and they are exactly what makes printed skin, fabric or stone read as convincing or fake.
When a studio with LAIKA's volume adopts a preview tool after a seven-month trial, in which the software also gained automation support, it suggests appearance simulation is being taken seriously as a production tool rather than a research demo. The more immediately relevant pieces for hobbyists are the resin-side offerings. A free calculator for mixing CMYKW resins may help anyone trying to tint SLA prints by eye, and a single-color SLA preview targets the same question at desktop scale: what will this actually look like when it comes out of the vat?
The broader lesson is about workflow. Test prints are cheap for one part and expensive for thousands. Tools that move that judgment from the printer to the screen are where the savings are meant to come from, though LAIKA's own results are still to be reported.
