By Christopher A. Sawyer
The Virtual Driver

(April 7, 2013) This is the first of a couple of Nissan videos I stumbled across, and know you’ll enjoy. It shows Hiroshi Kato and Naoki Maekawa sculpting the new Nissan Note clay model. Note the Sumo sculpture in the foreground made of modeling clay in the picture below.



Despite a massive increase in the use of digital modeling, it’s still necessary to do a full-size clay model to make sure that the design translates into the real world correctly. It’s only when you have the property sitting before you, and can view it under different lighting conditions and with other vehicles around it, that you can accurately judge whether the design is correct.

Years ago, I spent a week in Toronto, Canada, with Peter Brock, perhaps best known for penning the Cobra Daytona Coupe. We were visiting Alias, then an independent digital design software company, to see what a noted designer unfamiliar with the system could do with it. Brock brought along sketches he’d done of a small sports coupe to be made of lightweight materials and powered by the turbocharged DOHC Dodge Spirit engine Chrysler had developed with Lotus.

The vehicle had strong overtones of the Daytona Coupe, and was originally planned as a sports car to be built and sold by Carroll Shelby. The short front overhang, Brock said, was inspired by the short-nose D-Type Jaguar, and allowed the driver to get right up on top of the car in front without crunching the nose and hurting the aerodynamics.

Our design liaison from Alias, Paul (I wish I could remember his last name), scanned one of Brock’s drawings into the computer, and worked with him to build a 3D wireframe around that image. It took most of the week to do that and get the surfaces to flow as desired, but there wasn’t enough time to finish the nose and fully render the vehicle before we had to leave; Peter back to California and me back to Michigan where the story would run as the AutoWeek cover story the following week. Paul finished the rendering as best he could, leaving the nose undone, and the rear three-quarter image was the cover for the next issue.

One thing Brock told me that I have never forgotten, is that designers don’t create shapes, they move light around. By altering a line as little as 1/16th of an inch, the effect the light has on that panel, and how the shape reads to the naked eye can be altered drastically.

Though he could see the benefits of digital software like Alias had shown us, he was adamant that it would always to be necessary to build at least one full-size clay model to “check your work.” Not only did it give you the opportunity to make sure the light played as planned across the vehicle’s surface, it gave company executives the chance to see and, if necessary, touch the final product. They wouldn’t sign off on a design any other way.

As the years passed and we went our separate ways, I never forgot his words. Over the following years I previewed many immersive technologies, from 3D glasses to machines that projected full-size holograms, and none ever replaced the need for a full-size model, despite their creators’ claims to the contrary.

The Virtual Driver