ALL-NEW DISCOVERY OBJECT

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

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