How Polaris turned Gravity Sketch from a design tool into an essential collaboration tool

Tools used

Bringing spatial truth to concept development

Polaris delivers a broad portfolio of off‑road, on‑road, marine, snow, and commercial vehicles that most people dream about. These vehicles are complex, high-energy, and deeply personal to the people who ride them. Getting every proportion, character line, and ergonomic decision right at an early stage can streamline the design team’s work immensely.

For a long time, that process relied on 2D sketches, but 2D design has its limitations. You can cheat a sketch to look how you want it to look, but you can’t sit inside one. Similarly, you can’t adjust your sight lines, triangulate with your eyes, or confirm that someone riding a side-by-side vehicle with a 6-point harness can actually reach the glove box handle.

That gap between a sketch and a spatial reality was the friction Michael Hritz, industrial designer at Polaris, kept running into.

From the corner of the studio to the whole team in headsets

Michael picked up Gravity Sketch around 2020, largely self-taught through Instagram, and started using it seriously during the clay phase of the RZR buggy project. He built the interior in VR using a hidden line technique, and the results were immediate. The model was millable, ergonomics were validated at true scale, and questions that would have required formal ergonomics reviews no longer came up.

When industrial designer Sonny Fisher joined Polaris a couple of years later, Michael was still the only person in a headset. Sonny picked up the tool through collaborative sessions with Michael, and the pair started working in Rooms collaboratively. That’s when the tool’s potential as a shared environment, not just an individual creation tool, became clear.

The team’s workflow shifted to a collaborative design workflow because the results were visible, the efficiency was obvious, and it kept expanding. It now runs across the full process, from 3D sketching and collaborative modeling to cross-company reviews. “Instead of having to do 2 or 3 rounds of changes with this guy, I could just do it right in front of him and then we’re done and everyone signed off,” Michael says.

The Polaris design loop

The workflow Michael and Sonny described covers the full arc from early ideation through to stakeholder sign-off, with Gravity Sketch anchored firmly in the middle and now being included in the review process too.

Step 1: 2D exterior and interior sketching. The design process starts with traditional 2D sketches, establishing the overall theme, surface language, and key design directions for both exterior and interior.
Step 2: 3D form development in VR. The interior is designed in Gravity Sketch using a hidden line technique, capturing form language and spatial relationships at true scale. Working at 1:1 means ergonomic decisions, reach distances, and sight lines can all be validated inside the tool rather than in a separate formal review.
Step 3: Collaborative modeling. Design development moves into shared sessions, with designers building and reacting in real time. The model takes shape through live conversation rather than sequential rounds of feedback, and a form goes from intention to visible sketch at speed.
Step 4: AR overlay on the clay buck. With a physical seating buck set up in the studio, AR is used to superimpose the Gravity Sketch model onto the existing clay armature at true scale. Both designers review the same overlaid model, pulling surfaces and responding to each other in real time. Decisions that would have required a full clay phase became same-session conversations.
Step 5: Live stakeholder reviews on the seating buck. Management, the VP of Design, and internal partners from across the business get pulled into the space to review the model at true scale. Edits can be made on the fly, collapsing multi-round review cycles into a single session. Partners who don’t have access to headsets can review packaging elements, steering columns, and seat positions at the correct scale via LandingPad.
Step 6: Export and downstream handoff. For clay milling, the line work is stripped away and the underlying polygon data goes directly to the CNC process. The same model can be exported as an OBJ and imported into other tools as needed.

“My colleague is already a clay modeler, and it turns out that this tool lends itself well to what he does. For him, it's like a duck in water because with Gravity Sketch - sure, it's digital - but you're still using the controllers; you're sculpting with your hands basically. So it's almost a guarantee that clay modelers are going to be very effective in Gravity Sketch because they're still building surfaces with their hands in a virtual space."

Sonny Fisher, Industrial Designer, Polaris

Less discovery in clay, more confidence going in

For Michael and Sonny, this isn’t about replacing clay. There’s something about a physical model you can touch, bump into, and refine that isn’t going away. What changes is what teams arrive at clay having already figured out.

By the time a design reaches the clay phase, proportion decisions have been made, ergonomics have been validated, and stakeholders across the business have already stepped inside the design and responded to it. The clay phase becomes about execution rather than discovery, and that’s a meaningful shift in where time and resources get spent.

“You’re not chasing a theme in the clay model. You’re delivering on one that’s already been aligned,” Sonny says.