Car design is harder than I had thought... help please

I think you hit the nail on the head. As an ACCD grad you could literally hit the ground running.i got thrown into a production almost right away. But the thing I keep hammering away at my class is the level of professionalism expected. Everyone assumes if you are a grad of a top notch design school you better already know how to draw. It's the level of professionalism that I'm trying to instill in them that will separate them form thier peers. Knowing how to put a car together is the differentiator.

 

The other thing I would add is the illusive taste. Just because someone can render like no one's business or sketch so prolificly as to be able to cover all the floor does not mean a whole lot if there is no taste. Some renderings should never be made because a turd is still a turd after one gets past all the tricks of presentation. Same for sketches - just because it can be drawn doesn't mean it shouldn't have been crumpled up and thrown away. Tied to all this is that sketches and renderings can present that which cannot be achieved - not necessarily taking about manufacturing here but instead form transitions that either are not achievable of take a long distance to work. Example is making a line go from concave to convex in a short distance.

I hated clay in school. It stunk. It got into everything. It was a frustrating process trying to get to a desired result (in retrospect this was because Farrer was sleepwalking through most of his classes). The other thing at the time were all the stories of a lot of modelers being the design graduates that didn't get hired as designers. When I did the summer program at Chrysler and our group was in the real studio wing with 3 programs underway I had a real awakening about what good clay modelers could do. Watched one modeler make a winning nose proposal by really finessing Doug Wilson's design. Watched another modeler not do the same with something that should have been a winner for Carl Cameron. After graduating worked with 2 modelers. Because I was the new guy I got the understudy modeler while my boss got the experienced guy. Understudy and I worked together but it was never coming out right. We finally resorted to asking Bob over to figure it out and in about 15 minutes had it fixed because he understood what the forms actually had to do to get my design intent. Understudy and I looked at each other in amazment. Never, ever underestimate what a good modeler can do to make the designer look good.

Jeff

 

You are 100% correct.A good sculptor can make or break a design.I treated my sculptors with the same respect that the designers got.The mistake many new designers make is they look down on the sculptors,and as a result,get like treatment in return.Ironic we're having this conversation,because I'm now working with 2 recent CCS grads that have 0 clay experience,and does it ever show.I was spoiled in my former life.
Re: good & bad renderings/sketches,you're right.It is something that i experienced at ACCD & am now experiencing it with my class many years later.Some of the students think that just because it's a great looking rendering,it's automatically a good design.........wrong! Worked with a guy many years,and he would always say: "meet you in the clay".
Speaking of which.......that sh.. gets everywhere!
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to the posters that asked about car design books,I'll post a sample of various books about automotive design & the drawing skills/techniques books separately.

First are several books about car design in general and car design history past & present:
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then there are many books dealing with the drawing techniques & rendering skills....the Car Design Europe shouldn't be in this group,sorry...
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then there are also brand specific car design books,and again,disregard the book on the far right,it's a car design annual:
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The book on the far right "The Art of American Car Design" is the one I was trying to reference. Gave some interesting discussions about Harley Earl's early political battles against the engineers. Interesting how he describes Chuck Jordan walking out of an interview.

Greatest renderer is/was Syd Mead.

I will need to check some of my books to put in this listing.

Jeff

 

As a freelance designer, I get to experience the different So Cal studios and it is amazing how the different studios treat their clay modelers vs designers. Though the designers are always treated better, some studios really try to make things seem equal where as others are blatantly biased.

 

You should have heard some of Chuck's comments about Mr. Armi.......

 

I suspect that the really good modelers that are treated as second class citizens either eventually leave or the final results in the studio lack the finesse that comes from comitment. The modeler has to understand the nuances of form that many designers just don't have to; likely some never recognize what they don't know about form and what the modelers keep bailing them out on.

Jeff

 

That was a big advantage I had @ ACCD.Because I had been a sculptor @ Ford before going to ACCD.My models were always one step ahead of my classmates .

But it also taught me later on as a professional,just how important the sculptor's job really was. Some guys never "got" that concept.

 

So true. At the same time, many of the modelers come from the concept car shops or other less esteemed positions and feel like they have moved up to the big time, so they sometimes feel like their life is better and that's just how modelers are treated. Some studios avoid hiring ACCD grads as they know they are going to either feel defeated or start butting heads with the designers.

 

What is the opinion on what has happened with all the surfacing tools like Alias for the designers? Has it resulted in the designers understanding the details of form better earlier?

Jeff

 

From my own experience,I think it depends on the user.As you said earlier,all the tools in the world won't help if it's a crappy design to start with.

 

Unfortunately, Alias is such a complex program and surface is so complex to understand on screen that most designers won't, can't or do not want to learn it well enough to utilize it in a realistic manner. I teach Alias and I used to tell new designers just out of school that if they want to kick ass, they should really learn Alias (They all have some in school, some think they know what they are doing) and combine it with their sketching. It is a hard thing to do because everyone is so busy and deadlines are looming so they can not take the time away from what they need to do, which is sketch. In the end, it turns out that most designers do not want to learn it well because they want to sketch and they don't want their bosses to think that they could build their own cars because that will do 2 things, one is it will keep them from sketching, the other is that they will be forced to figure out what their sketch really is doing.
It is much easier to learn about surface in clay then in software because you can see what you are making and instinctively know how to fix it.
Lately studios have been trying to utilize polygonal modeling software which allows shapes to more easily be manipulated by designers. These models are only used for conceptual visualization so there is no concern that the designers will have to make anything real from them.

 

Agree with you. I think photoshop and some of the other drawing programs are the tools of choice. The guys that knew Alias were always highly valued on my teams. They could build lamps and basic surface that the photoshop guys just couldn't do. The sculptors however were usually the aces at Alias.

 

the auto companny/stylist clay sculptures do amazing work, i had opportunity to see an unpainted clay model in all it's brown glory once, and i couldn't imagine the skill...kudos to those guys

to me, all these designs digitally first, then just quickly modelled, IMO misses that important stage of massaging the design in a tacile way

personally, i'm not a big fan of most modern designs.....i don't know for sure, but maybe there is a connection to older design, and the methods??

 

There was a period in the '90's when a number of people thought clay would go away and be replaced with digital/virtual design.After many attempts,it became apparent that clay was important for a number of reasons,one being the ability to walk around the model and actually touch the surfaces.Digital/virtual will probably eventually replace the physical clay,but short term,it's going to be around.

Another reason for a shift in the techniques of designing cars IMHO is the abandonment of doing full size tape drawings/renderings.I believe most of the studios stopped doing these,and I think it was a way for designers to learn and appreciate line & surface development rather than just staring at a 27" computer monitor. But as with most things in history,the new tools will lead to new methods,and that should lead to new solutions.
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The tape drawing made one come to an understanding of the choices in a line/form. The rate that a curve accellerated, where was the peak, exactly where any point was. Every one of these was a conscious decision. Moving a line up or down, forward or aft all of this at even small amounts became noticable. At an even more basic level it taught the students the concept of overall proportion that cheated sexy sketches could not.

Picking up on the digital surface development without going to clay - remember a story in the press (Autoweek?) on the Chevy HHR. A comment was made that the rear fenders did not have enough vertical crown because of being designed digitally. The person said that this was a common mistake working solely in digital because the computer made it appear that that there was more surface than the eye would read.

Jeff

 

Never heard that HHR story......interesting.

 

Comment on the idea that digital can make one think that there is more surface than the eye will read? From your studio experiences when too much digital surface development was used in lieu of clay what were the typical shortcomings?

Jeff

 

I thought that some of the nuances/subtleties oftentimes were lost.The Lexus 2 seat showcar has very complex surfacing,and I was curious as to whether they were developed by hand or digitally. It's the transitions,radii,curves,form development that really benefit from a gifted sculptor's hands.Many times the speed at which a surface could be developed was quicker by hand than by computer.But I'm confident that the digital realm will eventually prevail.Progress marches on.

 

It was done in clay (If you are talking about the LF-LC released at detroit. It actually is a 4 seater). I think one area that the clay is better is in simple communication from the designer to the modeler and from the modeler to the designer, and that goes back to the visualization. It may be possible to get past the tactile aspects of the clay (Can a designer oversee a clay model without ever touching it? I think they could but never would/need to) but the visual aspects are where the clay rules and the computer side fails. It won't just take developing new 3D realization visualization software/hardware, it will also require designers to immerse themselves in the technology so they can truly wrap their brains around what they are seeing. This means that the people in charge must grow up with the technology, which means today's and tomorrow's bosses can not be in charge for the digital revolution to take that last step into replacing clay.
Today, even when cars are developed digitally, they are often milled in clay for refinement, or, if they go straight to hard model, there is an expected amount of bodywork. This also depends on what the car is for, whether the general public and press will see it or if it is an internal research design.

 

Thanks for the info on the Lexus.And I had forgotten it was a 4 seater.It sure looked like a "hands on" execution,but anymore,I like to be sure.

And you nailed it when you talk about a the new breed of mgt.The "old guys" (myself) were trained in the analog world,and that's how we evaluated surface/forms.My expectation is that a new generation of designers,reared in the digital world will be able to evaluate surface/form development maybe with little or no "hand on" actual 3D properties.

I know that just about everyone still mills in a hard model,even if the design was completed digitally.It was often a shock for the young designers and the design team to see their digitized designs get milled in and realize how much "adjustment" was going to be necessary to get it close to their original intent.It get's back to the subtleties I talked about before.

And,no.......a designer just has to touch the clay......that's what we do!!

 

I had a meeting at Mitsubishi maybe 8 years ago about doing some data work for them and the guy I met with was telling me how they hire these guys out of ACCD and they make models but when they mill them out, they don't look like what they thought they would look like. The most important question he had for me was "Do you know what it is going to look like when we mill it out". Fortunately, I could say yes to that. Unfortunately, they didn't want to pay to find out. Companies back then thought the computer was doing all the work and many thought that the software was not good enough yet and they should wait till it got better.