legacy effects is a live-action, practical effects company. we do designs and execute physical construction of effects. suits, puppets, robots- pretty much anything that comes our way. colony came to us. they go, "hey we've got this project." we were approached about doing an alien exoskeleton for theseason finale of the first season. so the next thing we do is we start designing.they had very specific things that it
3d print shop los angeles, needed to do. but maybe that's good built in like that. all of this could be soft. when we look at a part, we have to see what's thebest way to achieve that part. allen showed me some character sketches, and i said i think we can do this 100% on a makerbot z18.makerbot's been working with legacy
effects for a while now, and we're reallyexcited by the work that they do because they're constantly pushing theboundaries of what's possible with 3d printing. 3d printing is the process ofextruding plastic layer by layer to create a three-dimensional object. sowe set it up. the first print out of it, it did the whole shin to ankle on it, absolute- noproblem. i did the first test and handed it over and they did their strength testto it and they're just like, "this is going to be fine." i knew that direct manufacturing might be a way for us to cut out the molding and castingprocesses. what is this stuff? it's pla.
the material that we use in our printers isa corn-based filament and with other machines, a suit like this would cost tens ofthousands of dollars. we still have to paint it and touch it and polish and make it ready. we'll never get rid of the artistry behind it. even the directmanufactured parts, as they still require hand work. and that's the artist that wehave here. see in the traditionalist, then do whatever he or she is doing to it and take it to the next level, it's pretty cool. and lo and behold, i think it was less than two weeks that iprinted out everything that you see on
that colony suit. i didn't have onefailed build on that entire suit and the end result was exactly what we needed. it'sexciting because, you know, we're on the
cutting edge of what's happening. you getto showcase the technology to people and it inspires them to use it in ways thatwe wouldn't have thought of.
