The mission started in a strange way. My first job was supposed to be the rear fender of the LAGUNA II. And it was... But the first days, it consisted just in loading the previous version of the file, and changing the view, sometimes. And the rest of the team used to do the same. Waiting while keeping looking busy...And waiting for what? For the clay modelers to make the car. But what about the current model, there's already a complete car! And not one but three, in fact. Three different designs. And moreover, for each design, 2 rears, a sedan one and an estate one... What happens here? Would I have missed something?.
In order to save time and money, the Design Management tried a new experiment.
Making clay models at reduced scale (2/5) and resize the digital models at full scale.
In the beginning, it was OK. Less clay. Less clay modelers. Less time for change...
And for digital surfacing it's transparent.
But when the cars were eventually milled, they revealed their real apparence for the first time,
and...And it was catastrophic.
Sometimes, the principle of reality hits very hardly. The perception of the proportions is a complex phenomenon that involves not only the eye but also the brain. Subjectivity is not scalable! At full scale, the cars had lost all the strenght and balance of the small clay models. It was pretty clear that the clay job had to be done again and at scale 1:1, this time!
After some few weeks, the new clay models started to take shape. And it was possible to restart the normal process