To many, this year’s Academy Awards were one to forget after the presentation blunders and award winner mixups. For the 3D printing world, however, they’ll be one to remember. The Oscar statuettes for the awards were actually 3D printed by upstate New York company, Polich Tallix Fine Art Foundry. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences enlisted the company to produce an award similar to the first ever Oscar statuette given in the 1929 awards.
Daniel Plonski, an artist at Polich Tallix, began work on this task by first taking 3D scans of both a recent statue and one from 1929. Upon doing this, he was able to pull qualities from each design and form a new design with them. From there, the scans were 3D printed, molded and then cast in wax. Once Plonski had his wax statuette, a team of experts from Polich Tallix coated each one in a ceramic shell. They cured and fired these statuettes at 1,600 degrees Fahrenheit which consequently melted the wax away and gave them an Oscar-shaped, empty form. They then hand cast them in liquid bronze. Once they cooled off and were sanded, the final step was to coat them in the famous 24-karat gold layer. The final product displays much more defined features, from the ears to the part in the hair to the sword all the while keeping the glamorous “Oscar” look.