3D Automotive Deep Dive 02 - From Sketch to Steel: How a Car Actually Gets Designed
Where the process breaks down, why it still works anyway, and why car paint might be the hardest problem in the industry
I’ve always been a sucker for one specific kind of visual trick. Take the exact same gray square and drop it onto a black background, then drop an identical copy onto a white background. Your brain will swear they’re two different shades of gray, but nope. Same pixels and values and everything. Just our dumb reptile brains making mistakes.
Turns out this phenomenon is called simultaneous contrast, and there’s an entire branch of color theory built around it. Josef Albers spent a career proving the point, most famously in his 1963 book Interaction of Color where its said that color isn’t a fixed fact sitting on a surface, it’s a negotiation between that surface and everything around it.
That negotiation is one of the more expensive, more stubborn problems in the entire automotive industries and at the central point of what I’m deepdiving into today.
So far, we looked at where automotive design came from and why clay never actually left the building. This week I want to slow down and walk through the design process end to end, because that color problem sits right in the middle of it.
The Process Hasn’t Really Changed
To understand why this industry still designs cars the way it does, it helps to know where the process actually came from.
In 1927, GM president Alfred Sloan created something called the Art and Color Section and put a former coachbuilder named Harley Earl in charge of it. Earl had been sculpting car bodies out of clay for custom builds in Los Angeles, and Lawrence Fisher, the general manager of Cadillac, liked the results enough to bring him to Detroit to design the 1927 LaSalle. Earl’s team was initially nicknamed the “pretty picture boys” and their studio the “Beauty Parlor.”
By 1937 the department had been renamed the Styling Section, and full-size clay modeling had become the standard way General Motors developed the shape of a car, because clay let designers explore forms that were slow and expensive to create in actual steel.
That’s the origin of the exact process I described in last week’s article, and it’s still, structurally, the same process today. Someone has a concept. That concept becomes 2D sketches, loose at first, then increasingly refined. Alongside the sketches come swatches and samples, small physical pieces of material and color you can actually hold, even though none of them are the car. Eventually, someone sculpts the shape out of clay, full size, and from that clay comes a prototype. Nearly a hundred years after Harley Earl’s studio got its start, this is still roughly how cars get designed.
The Gap
Look closely at that chain and there’s a hole running straight through it. Clay tells you about form and proportion, but it’s clay, gray and matte, nothing like the metallic paint or the glass or the chrome that will actually sit on the finished car. A 2D sketch can sell an idea, but it can’t show you how a shape reads in motion, at full scale, with real weight and volume behind it. And swatches, useful as they are, live in isolation. You’re holding a piece of leather in one hand and a paint chip in the other, being asked to imagine them sitting three feet apart on a real vehicle, under real light.
None of that is a surprise to anyone who has worked in physical product design. What’s different about automotive is what’s riding on getting it wrong, and how long the industry has known it has this problem without fully solving it.
What 3D Actually Closes
3D doesn’t replace any of those steps. That’s worth saying because it’s tempting to assume otherwise. What it does is build a tighter bridge between them, closing the distance between what you have to assume from a swatch and a sketch and what the prototype will actually look like.
The digital half of this story has its own origin, and it starts at Renault rather than in a computer lab. In the 1960s, a Renault mathematician named Pierre Bezier was trying to solve a very specific problem: how do you describe the curved surface of a car body mathematically, precisely enough that it can be manufactured the same way twice? His answer became known as the Bezier curve, and it’s still one of the foundational tools of every 3D package you’ve ever opened. Renault’s system, called UNISURF, eventually got licensed to Dassault Aviation in 1976, which had been using it to complement the CAD tools it built for the Mirage fighter jet program. A year later that work became the first version of CATIA. It’s a strange loop: the math that shapes a fighter jet and the math that shapes a mid-sized sedan trace back to the same French engineer trying to keep a car’s roofline consistent.
That’s the piece 3D actually adds to Earl’s original chain. It doesn’t remove the sketch, the swatch, or the clay. It turns the guesswork sitting in the middle of that process into something closer to a preview, something you can iterate on before you commit to steel, or scissors, or a stitched panel.
Nobody Owns the Whole Car
One assumption I had to unlearn early is that there’s a single “3D artist for this car.” That’s not how it works. The work splits by discipline the same way the design team itself splits. Exterior designers spend their time on the shape of the vehicle and 3D artists spend a huge amount of time on the paint. The specific colors, the flake shape, the flake size, the flake pattern, the coat sitting on top of it, the way it all reads together. That is job enough alone for one person.
CMF designers, meaning color, material, and finish, take everything on the inside: the leather, the stitching, the dashboard material, the steering wheel. Basically everything you touch and interact with is inside of their domain.
A newer group handles the screens, because a modern car interior is as much interface design now as it is upholstery.
Every company splits this differently, but the split itself is universal.
Why Paint Is a Problem
If there’s one thing to take from this article, it’s that car paint is not a detail. It’s the single hardest and most important thing to get right in this entire industry, not because it needs to look pretty, but because it needs to be true. And it has been a genuine materials science arms race for almost a century.
The first production metallic car paint went on a 1929 DeSoto, and the metallic shimmer in it came from actual ground fish scales, because nobody had figured out a cheaper way to get that effect yet.
Fish scales stayed in use, at mucho expense, until the 1950s, when Alcoa developed engineered aluminum flake specifically for paint, brighter and more consistent than anything organic. Porsche and Volkswagen were among the first to put that aluminum flake into production finishes in 1953. By the 1970s, chemists had moved on to mica flakes, which is where a lot of the pearlescent, color-shifting paints on the road today come from. Every one of those transitions happened because the previous generation of pigment couldn’t do what designers wanted it to do.
Which brings us back to the color problem. There are two separate worlds trying to describe that pigment, and historically they have not spoken the same language. One is the manufacturable side, built around getting a paint formula that can be reproduced, consistently, on a factory floor anywhere in the world. That side traces back to 1963, when a former ink chemist named Lawrence Herbert bought the technology assets of a struggling New Jersey printing company for fifty thousand dollars, renamed it Pantone, and reduced color specification down to a system of ten base inks. Pantone became the universal reference language for printing, then packaging, then paint, then just about everything else. In 2007, the company that makes the AXF file format, X-Rite, bought Pantone outright for 180 million dollars, which means the measurement side and the specification side of manufacturable color now technically live under the same corporate roof.
The other world is the visualization side, the one most of us think of as normal 3D: OpenPBR, ACES, the floating point pipeline that renders an image on a screen. Even with Pantone and X-Rite consolidated into one company, that side still doesn’t fully speak the same language as the rendering pipeline most 3D artists were trained on. A color measured in a lab and a color rendered on a screen can both claim to be correct and still not agree with each other.
And even when they do agree, there’s a second, nastier problem waiting. It’s called metamerism, and it’s the reason a repaired fender can look perfect next to the original panel in the body shop and then look noticeably wrong the second the car pulls into daylight. Two paint samples can share the exact same color under one light source and diverge completely under another, because their underlying pigments reflect light differently even when the end result looks identical to the eye in that one moment. It’s simultaneous contrast’s uglier cousin: instead of the surroundings changing what you see, the light source does. This is exactly why the lighting setup in a render has to replicate a cloudy day, direct sun, and a garage under fluorescents, not because it’s thorough for its own sake, but because a color that survives all three is the only color you can trust.
The Job Is Trust
Underneath all of this is trust. Executives are making real financial decisions based on what they see on a screen. If that screen is lying to them, even slightly, even in a way that’s technically explainable by a hundred years of color science, the decision is still wrong, and it’s an expensive kind of wrong to walk back.
That’s the job (whether or not it ever shows up in a posting.) Take whatever part of the car you’re responsible for and build the most accurate, most believable representation of it you can, so someone with the authority to greenlight it can do so with confidence.
And accuracy here isn’t one thing going right. It’s everything going right at the same time. A perfect model with slightly wrong materials still fails. Correct materials under a renderer that clips its values still fails. Everything lined up under lighting that doesn’t match how the car will actually be judged still fails. The only way this works is when the model, the materials, the renderer, and the lighting all agree with each other at once, under every condition someone might actually look at the car. That’s a much narrower target than “looks good,” and it’s why automotive keeps its 3D talent this specialized.
Next week I want to get into the tooling that makes any of this possible, because it isn’t the software most of you already know. I didn’t know it existed either, five years ago. Small preview: there’s a program called VRED, and to this day I’ve heard people pronounce it two completely different ways, like the color or like it’s one word, Fred with a V bolted onto the front. We’ll sort that out next week.
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Hello! Michael Tanzillo here. I am the Head of Technical Artists with the Substance 3D team at Adobe. Previously, I was a Senior Artist on animated films at Blue Sky Studios/Disney with credits including three Ice Age movies, two Rios, Peanuts, Ferdinand, Spies in Disguise, and Epic.
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