ONELIFE #33 – English

ALL-NEW DISCOVERY
OBJECT 01:
CLAY MODELING TOOLS
In this digital age, it’s pleasing to think that some tasks can
still only be done properly by hand and eye, using age-old
materials and tools. Once the design theme for the All-New
Discovery had been settled with a series of sketches and
scale models, the design team created a complete, detailed
virtual model of the new car which they could view on huge
screens. When they’d finished the design digitally, they milled
a full-size model of it from a surprisingly low-tech material for
this very hi-tech company: clay.
Okay, so this is very refined, expensive modelling clay,
carefully temperature-controlled for optimum malleability
and capable of being endlessly remoulded, not to mention
polished and painted, but it’s still brown and muddy-looking
when it first emerges from the milling machine. And that’s
when the real work starts.
“I’ve simply never known a design that has looked right
as soon as it has emerged from that milling machine,” says
Land Rover Chief Designer Andy Wheel. “When you look at
a design on a screen, it’s just an image, and with an image
you’re a slave to the lens, even if the lens is virtual. The
simple fact is that there’s no lens better than the human eye,
and no replacement for seeing a real, full-size model of the
car, and being able to walk around it and touch it.”
The designers then set to work on the clay car alongside
specialist modellers, altering its details and radii by fractions
of a millimetre or a degree, using simple tools like those
pictured above, shaped to create sharp edges or curves,
and which have changed little in the millennia that
have passed since we first started working clay. “It’s a
partnership,” says Wheel. “Our modellers know instinctively
how to work a highlight, or how surfaces should come
together. When we’ve finished reworking a section we’ll
scan it again, and it goes back into the digital realm. But to
really get it right, you have to do it by hand and eye.”
40