Brian McLean

Leica has been taking super dense point cloud data and transferring them into 3D printed voxels and being able to precisely control voxels in a 3D space.

We're at the tip of the innovation spear in this area.

We can take hard materials and soft materials and combine them on a voxel level, producing a brand new material with unique properties in the process.

Remember how a 3D object is built up out of layers?

Well, it turns out you can take the CAT scan data and you can 3D print a perfect replica of a patient's body part.

By taking voxels, you can create materials that are like bone, tissue, muscle, veins, and skin.

A surgeon,

can take real patient data and 3D print a perfect replica of a patient's head with the exact placement of their tumor and then do a practice operation removing that tumor.

Like his very own Rob Ducey, who was part of that original team in 2006,

has helped write a research paper along with Nick Dickinson and other researchers in the medical field on this very subject.

It's amazing to see Leica Animation Studios, alongside other prestigious medical researchers, as the one pioneering the use of voxel printing in the medical field.

But we're like any other user in the 3D printing world.

Yes, we've won a scientific and technical Oscar for pioneering the use of 3D printing and stop-motion animation, but most other users are creating prototypes.

We're using a 3D printer as a creative expression, in a way, bringing still objects to life.

Each face we print is unique.

Each one is a work of art that's hand-finished by artists.

For our latest film, Missing Link, we printed over 106,000 unique faces.

We have a face library run by face librarians who catalog and archive each individual expression.

We've also won a Guinness Book of World Records for the most number of 3D-printed faces in a stop-motion animated film.

I don't think anyone else is competing in that category, but it's still pretty cool.