Special Makeup Effects for Stage and Screen, 3rd Edition

11 3D Printing for Prosthetics and Animatronics

Key Points

• ■ Introduction
• ■ History
• ■ Uses
• ■ Design process
• ■ Technology
• ■ Operation
• ■ Application
• ■ Future

Introduction

By the time the fourth edition of this book is released, personal 3D printers will be probably as common as microwaves and laptop computers. And this chapter in that edition may be more substantial. That may be a bit of an exaggeration, but maybe not so much. Just in the time I’ve been working on this chapter for the third edition, huge advances in the technology have been made in numerous fields of application. 3D printing has actually been around since the 1980s. I haven’t been aware of it quite that long, but I have known about it for a while; in fact, one of the schools where ...