Have you had a chance to see the film “Tomorrowland”? It’s a fun glimpse into the future and in many ways we are already there. The story includes a bunch of kids ready to see things very differently when they travel into the future and guess what, modular fixturing appears in the last few minutes of the film featuring a current automotive design studio. The camera pans over a clay model under a milling machine or CMM with a measuring system and sculpting head and the room is filled with modular fixturing for small scale model making in clay by artists and sculptors. These are called armatures (a metal framework on which a sculpture is molded with clay or similar material).
Over the decades, clay modeling for automotive model making has been the choice worldwide to bring all types of art and concepts to life. This utilizes a fixture or armature. In the automotive world of vehicle design these are used to model half-scale to full-scale models for appearance, test and development. Usually, these concepts are derived from a team of artists that first design in CAD, or in the old days on miles of paper taped to the drawing boards in the studio. The CAD files for the model are loaded into a CMM type of machine and the cutting head gets to work based on the program after many changes and approvals. Some final sculpting is then possible by hand.