Behind this year’s must-have toys is a quiet digital revolution. As the pressure to design faster, smarter and more sustainably grows, leading toy makers are swapping clay and carving tools for advanced 3D sculpting software – proving that today’s Santa’s little helpers work in pixels, not plastic, without losing the creativity and craftsmanship children expect. Eleazar Kim-Carmeli, Director of 3D and Sculpting and Creative Resources at JAKKS Pacific, explains.
When children unwrap their favourite toys this Christmas – a Disney princess, a Simpsons collectable or a Sonic the Hedgehog figure – few will realise that their gifts didn’t come from the North Pole, but from a digital workshop in California.
Inside the design studios of JAKKS Pacific, one of the world’s leading toy manufacturers, our team of modern-day ‘elves’ are hard at work. But instead of carving clay or moulding plastic, our designers sculpt in pixels. They craft toys with incredible precision using advanced 3D design technology that brings to life the characters under millions of Christmas trees.
Digital sculpting software enables our team to feel every contour of their creation as they shape it on screen. From the texture of a superhero’s cape to the exact curve of a princess’s smile, every detail is digitally perfected before a single toy goes into production.
At JAKKS Pacific we now have a faster, smarter and more sustainable way to create toys, without losing the artistry that makes them special. Advances in software mean scaling up for mass production does not compromise creativity or quality. We can move from concept to prototype in a fraction of the time it used to take – without the days of printing and cleaning. We produce samples in weeks instead of months and adapt quickly without affecting quality.
This is vital in the toy industry because tastes and demand patterns can change within a week. Using advanced software enables us to make refinements as trends evolve, responding to a particular type of articulation that proves very popular, or changing the detailing.
What has been critical is the software we use – Hexagon’s Geomagic Freeform. This enables us to use all the traditional aspects of toy-making creativity in a hugely more efficient way. We can create toys that are wholly faithful to their characters and bring them to life while streamlining our processes. The software respects your talent and enables you to be more creative. That’s why when I arrived, I insisted we use it.
Passion that turns into fidelity
JAKKS Pacific is a company where there is a lot of passion and respect for the people who are going to be enjoying the toys we make. We have never been in the business of pushing out plastic – whether in a two-inch or a 10-inch figure. What we want to match up to the picture on the box and meet the expectations of the children who are our ultimate customers.
Design accuracy is also essential for us because of licensing agreements. Toys have to look like the characters in the video game, film or TV series, and are subject to approval from the parent brand before going into production.
A design focus on play
Yet we still need to inject life into those figures and that requires skill in sculpting and in articulation. We have to design a toy so that hands, legs, paws and so on move in a way that is easy and encourages play while being robust enough to withstand use by a four-year-old. Our teams understand they must make it easy for children to play with figures – not just admire them. That is our magic that you rarely see elsewhere.
Success in this comes from achieving the right balance between artistic freedom and engineering control. Plastic toys are small sculptures with intricate details that go into mass production.
The Geomagic Freeform software we use to create these figures brings together digital sculpting with computer-aided design technology (CAD), to give us the right balance while saving huge amounts of time. It enables designers to execute a complete toy design workflow – from brief to prototype – in one environment.
This ensures the piece is manufacturable. We can work out whether scaling from a two-inch figure to something much bigger will lose details and whether a reduction in size will make the figure overblown in some way.
Traditional CAD struggles with the sort of organic forms you find in toy figures, but the Hexagon software gives us real design freedom without complex feature constraints. The interface gives us the tactile feedback we need, which makes it easier to learn. In effect, we have a solution that gives us the intuitive clay-like modelling we need, but which is also accurate to ten-thousandths of an inch.
Saving time in design is vital
Our planning for Christmas and the holiday season starts nine months to a year in advance, and any errors must be corrected as early as possible to avoid delays because time is precious. There are many moving parts to sort out – physical and metaphorical – before we move into production, including consultations with retailers, licence-holders and partners.
We do not want to find an element is too thin or small or that a rotational pivot does not function as required once the figure goes into production. The software provides us with the real-world measurements and dimensions we need to get features exactly right. It is a far cry from the early digital sculpting tools I had to use. Some of these had an esoteric interface or a linear approach to work, which made their use very difficult.
Removal of trial-and-error
The great advantage now is that we have removed so much of the trial-and-error and can move into production so quickly. We no longer have to spend up to three days printing out a prototype, cleaning it up and then sending it round for review. It could take you a week before you decided something was not right.
Now we can tell almost immediately whether a design works. And we can share those designs with our factories in different countries within the same application so there are no difficulties around language, nomenclature or different types of software. What we see on the screen is what goes in the packaging at the end, and is true to the concept and final design.
It is hard to overstate the impact of a digital tool such as Geomagic Freeform. I started my career working with clay and wax. It was hugely satisfying but time-consuming and messy. Now our teams are able to deploy the full range of their talents while accelerating design and production and lowering costs. The results speak for themselves in happy young faces at Christmas.
Eleazar Kim-Carmeli is Director of Creative Resources and 3D Design & Sculpting at JAKKS Pacific, bringing over two decades of expertise in toy design and sculpting. A traditionally trained sculptor and graduate of the Lyme Academy College of Fine Art, he began his career with hands-on manual sculpting and rigorous artistic training, including anatomical and model work, before expanding into digital workflows. Known for fostering strong collaboration between art and engineering, Eleazar combines passion, precision, and a deep understanding of both creative expression and production realities to help JAKKS Pacific innovate in the global toy market.
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