Interview

We heard that you moved from clay modeling to the CG animation team.

Yes, I studied sculpture at university and so joined Nissan as a clay modeler. When I was originally searching for jobs, I was not that strongly interested in industrial design, but when I participated in the Nissan internship, I felt that Nissan’s unique method of looking at automobiles as four-legged animals was similar to ideas about human sculptures and thus decided to join the company.
I moved to the CG design team in my seventh year at Nissan, having gained experience as a clay modeler, but behind the move lies the trend towards a digital shift that encourages manufacturing to become digital. The need to make use of the digital world grew further after the spread of COVID-19 in particular. I personally had no CG experience at all until my move and learned how to use 3DCG and video production software from scratch, but ways to attractively present three-dimensional forms and similar areas benefited from my experience as a clay modeler, and I feel that the two areas are connected in many aspects.

What is the essential delight of producing CG animation?

The movies and still images of cars and the other things that we produce with CG are used in various phases of the decision-making process for the design. Being involved over a wide area that runs from 3DCG model production to evaluating scenarios, editing video, and selecting theme-appropriate music is one of the real pleasures. What is important in particular is to correctly understand the concept of the car and the points that we want to pursue and to change how it is presented depending on the phase of development and the objective. For example, the focus points are completely different between the stage of evaluating the design and the phase immediately before presentation, so we need to produce animation while considering first and foremost the objective for the output.
Furthermore, what left an impression as a former clay modeler is the speed of production with digital tools. I can take on things that time constraints would not permit in a design process using physical models, and with CG, I can create scenes in unrealistic environments or foreign locations without taking models there, which are just a few of the ways that digital technology is steadfastly expanding the scope of expression in car design.