All present cars are designed on a computer, the modern equivalent of stories such as the one about how children would climb over Sir William Lyons’ manor wall and watch Mr. Jaguar sketch out his designs in the back yard do not have a modern equivalent.
If they did, it would imply the kids would be familiar with the use of window-washing equipment, so as to ascend to the upper floors of the skyscrapers where cars are dreamt up nowadays, and peer through the glass at computer screens.
Nevertheless, there’s still one aspect of car design which has remained virtually unchanged since the best days of car design – clay modeling. It is not talked about that much, but it is a very important stepping-stone for a car from being a mere digital representation to an actual physical object one can actually walk around and look at. This is very important, because some cars look better (or worse) in the metal (or clay, in this case), and this needs to be checked before a project can progress.
Nissan has now just released a video about clay modeling, which does go into the specifics of how it’s all done, and the video linked after the jump is a worthy watch, if you have around seven minutes to allocate for learning about this matter.
By Andrei Nedelea
VIDEO