“We manufacture super-sized, hyper-realistic human figures, creatures, vehicles, and other huge props for film and television and have always been on the search for technology that can produce large parts at a high speed,” said Richard Taylor, Weta Workshop Co-Founder, CEO and Creative Director. “For 15 years, we have dreamed of a day when a printer would provide super large scale, speed, and build strength at low print costs, in equal measure. The Massivit 1800 has delivered this for us. With the Massivit 1800, our team has been able to redefine what is creatively possible for our large-scale manufacturing projects. It is a powerful and versatile machine that has transformed the way we work and has supercharged our output. It really is a dream come true.”
“We’re often required to create 8- or 9-meter-tall (26.2 or 29.5-foot) sculptures and mannequins, which means we need to print multiple parts and then manually fit them together,” he said. “Needless to say, this is both time-consuming and expensive. The largest commercially available SLA 3D printer in the country has a maximum print volume of 60 x 60 x 40 centimeters, whereas the Massivit 1800 allows us to print up to 1.8-meter-high [5.9-foot] components. We can also print much more quickly and with far greater geometry freedom than with CNC machining.”
Weta Workshop believes that it will save thousands of dollars by using the new large-scale 3D printer. The Massivit 1800 has already been especially useful on a recent project that required the production of large-scale molds. It would have been a challenge to produce these molds using CNC technology, due to the molds’ size and the inability of CNC routers to create complex, deep intrusions.
“The Massivit 1800 has surpassed our expectations insofar as the added capabilities and extra efficiency it delivers our operations,” said Taylor. “Since its installation, it has stimulated a lot of creative thought and our teams are buzzing with what we will be able to achieve with it moving forward.”
3D printing has already appeared in several popular movies, from the costumes in Black Panther to the stop-motion images in several LAIKA films. Weta Workshop has not revealed which upcoming movie will be the first to feature large-scale props made with the Massivit 1800, but it’s almost a guarantee, given the studio’s past work as well as Massivit’s capabilities, that they will be impressive.
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