Nick Graveley’s VR workflow: modernizing automotive clay sculpting

Tools used

From clay to digital: a shift in automotive design

For more than 20 years, Nick Graveley has worked primarily in the motorcycle industry, offering design sculpture services and helping manufacturers find the final form of a vehicle before it goes into production.

Clay modeling has been an essential part of the automotive design workflow since the 1930s, and the process has remained largely unchanged: a designer and clay sculptor work together with knife lines and tape lines to refine surfaces until the form is right.

Clay has endured because it is physical, spatial, and captures qualities a flat monitor never quite can. However, it can also be expensive, messy, labor intensive, and increasingly isolated as other parts of the workflow have moved to digital processes.

For Nick, the question became how to combine the benefits of both clay and digital tools while still leveraging the skills of experienced clay designers.

A pivotal moment in a VR headset

The shift began in 2017, when Nick worked on the Zero SRF and SRS motorcycles. Zero had no legacy processes to work around, which gave him the freedom to try new solutions that reduced the distance between physical and digital. First, a handheld scanner, the Peel 2, allowed him to scan the clay model in 10 to 15 minutes, snap it to known coordinates over the engineering package, and output those surfaces to anyone who needed them.

The second technological leap was putting on a VR headset for the first time. Alan Valencia, a digital modeler at Zero, took one of the scans, cut it into components, and added texture and color. With VR, Nick could see his own clay work rendered in full color at true scale for the first time.

That experience in 2017 planted the seed. When the Quest 2 launched in 2020, Nick bought it immediately to explore what was possible and discovered that it solved a problem he had not fully realized he had.

From on‑site clay studios to virtual workflows

As most freelance clay modelers know, the work has always meant travel. Workshops are where the clay is, and the clay is rarely where you live.

For Nick, VR helped to removed that conflict. He can now collaborate with designers anywhere in the world from his home studio as long as he has his headset and an internet connection. In fact, Nick estimates that VR has replaced around 90 percent of the form‑finding clay modeling work.

The creative process itself did not change as much as the location. What used to be knife lines and tape lines on a physical model became line strokes and inclines in Gravity Sketch. The process still has the same designer sculptor dynamic and the same back‑and‑forth problem solving, but the workflow now runs in VR instead of on a workshop floor.

Nick highlights several benefits of a VR‑first automotive design workflow:

Clay modelers no longer need to travel, and studios can access global talent
Creative collaboration becomes easier and can extend beyond designers and modelers to engineers and leadership, which tightens the loop between aesthetics and engineering
Changes are quick and easy to make, with no physical waste
Clay milling is expensive, and VR design helps reduce milling rounds and save costs

"It is astonishingly close. For anybody who has seen data on a flat monitor and milled it out and felt that gap in their understanding about what they thought it was going to look like and what it actually looks like, going from Gravity Sketch into a milled model feels so familiar. It looks exactly like the model you have been looking at for the last couple of weeks."

Nick Graveley, Modeler and Educator

Nick’s VR‑first design workflow

Nick’s workflow runs from initial sketching through Alias handoff, with Gravity Sketch replacing the clay studio for most of the form‑finding stage and 3D scanning closing the loop when physical validation is needed.

Step 1: Reference sketching. The process starts with sketches used as spatial references rather than finished drawings. Nick pulls line work in Gravity Sketch around the sketch, using the lines to infer the surfaces between each break, similar to the tape‑line process in clay modeling.
Step 2: Line work and surface building in Gravity Sketch. With the line work establishing the form language, surfaces are skinned between those lines. Nick describes this as feeling increasingly automated. Skinning has become fast and intuitive, and form decisions can be made in the same session as the line work.
Step 3: Collaborative refinement. Design development moves into collaborative Room sessions. A designer pulls lines or suggests moves, and Nick responds and adjusts surfaces. This mirrors the real‑time dialogue of working around a clay model.
Step 4: Clay milling for validation (when budget allows). Once the VR model reaches a point of confidence, the mesh can go straight to milling. The same human perspective at full scale means there is no distortion between the VR model and the physical object. Small clay corrections handle the final one to two millimeters of refinement.
Step 5: 3D scanning. Any refinements made to the physical clay model are captured with a 3D scanner. The scan is aligned to engineering coordinates and re‑imported into Gravity Sketch to keep digital and physical models synced.
Step 6: Handoff to Alias and back. Final surfaces go to Alias for NURBS refinement and engineering output. The Alias modeler exports a high‑fidelity OBJ, brings it back into Gravity Sketch, and Nick joins the same Room to review highlights and surface quality together.

The skills did not disappear, the medium changed

Nick is careful to clarify what VR replaces and what it does not. Clay will likely always be the right tool for the last layer of surface refinement, for sitting on a motorcycle, and for the kind of tactile validation no headset can fully simulate yet.

What VR replaces is the expensive, slow, travel‑dependent part of the process that used to happen before any of that. This includes the form‑finding, the iteration, and the designer sculptor collaboration that once required both people to be in the same room with the same lump of clay.