Veteran Makeup FX Artists Steve Yang and Eddie Wang from Alliance Studio—an entertainment design and build studio—discuss how 3D printing with Raise3D has shaped the new era of special effects and sculpture creation.

Steve Yang: I moved to L.A. to get into the makeup effects industry. This was a time when the movie The Thing had come out already, American Werewolf in London, The Howling. These were huge innovations in makeup effects. I was lucky enough to get in with Stan Winston Studios when I first got here and work for him for a few months.

Then I went to Rick Baker’s as a sculptor for Harry and the Henderson’s. And I think, it wasn’t until shortly after that I met Eddie. He was 17. Here’s this amazing kid, really talented, and he wanted to meet me. We instantly hit it off and have been friends ever since.

Eddie Wang: Steve had this completely unique way of doing things. At the time everything was humanoid, what we called a “safe design.” It was all monster paint jobs using purples and flesh tones. Everything was done in a very boring fashion. And then Steve showed up to the monster maker contest with this hermit crab inspired, sea creature amphibian paint job with this samurai kilt underneath everybody was like, “Oh my God, it’s beautiful, it’s designed well, it’s something we’ve never seen before.” 

Steve Yang: In those days, everything we did in the industry was started with clay. We’d do maquettes, but our final products were always done in clay. And when I slowly moved out of the makeup effects arena, I started getting more into creating statues for video games.

The first one I did was for Blizzard back in 2004, and it wasn’t until 2010 when they came to me, and they had this giant robot guy named Jim Raynor, a guy in the robot suit and they show me the 3D model and say, “We want you to make this.” At that point, it was totally different from what I’ve done before. Before everything was done traditionally, and now I’ve got this giant robot. And so that’s the first time that I really got into digital. Digital printing is a huge part of what we do now.

A while back digital printing was something relatively new, now it’s everywhere. Every studio has a 3D printer. It just makes so much more sense. They are so much easier to work with. Plus it’s a one-to-one operation. You design stuff on the computer digitally and you get exactly what you designed. The first printer we ever bought was a Makerbot, but it was too small, and we needed something bigger, we need solutions. So, we started researching into larger printers, and we looked at every company.

I think we were on a tour of Blizzard Studios when Brian Faison said you should look into Raise3D. Sure enough we contacted John over at Raise3D and he had a printer here ASAP.  He rolled it out of the truck, plugged it in, and showed us how to use it. That was pretty much the history. 

What we got with Raise3D was a bigger build space and higher resolution. We were able to actually make some of the parts we needed for the big life-size statues. We print them, take them to the back, clean them up, and do a regular finishing on them. You can’t tell the difference between that and the parts that we actually farm out to the big printing companies. You do one job, and it pays for the printer. Oh yeah, the price was a huge thing because the ones we were looking at were two and three times more than a Raise3D printer. We were expecting to purchase one system, but we were able to afford two of them. Since then, we have recommended Raise3D to so many people. As artists, and being creative every day, we think of unique ways of utilizing this technology and the machinery. We can do things that we have never done before.

See conversation video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BYd7eS4o2ws&embeds_referring_euri=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.raise3d.com%2Fcase%2Fthe-advanced-tech-behind-movies-heres-why-every-film-studio-now-owns-a-3d-printer%2F 

See Alliance Studios video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=14&v=ZDGIuNLDvXM&embeds_referring_euri=https%3A%2F%2Falliancestudios.gg%2F&embeds_referring_origin=https%3A%2F%2Falliancestudios.gg&source_ve_path=Mjg2NjIsMjg2NjY 

For information:

Raise3D: Https://www.Raise3d.com 

Raise3D Demo Videos: https://www.raise3d.com/demo-video/ 

Alliance Studios: https://alliancestudios.gg/