Clayton Haight

I have always had a love for cars, from F1 to sports cars, something about them feels very satisfying. Since the invention of the car, constant iteration on the design has brought us to what we have now. The beautiful curves and fancy bodywork that makes an automobile is the product of years of improvements and upgrades. The amount of engineering and design work that makes up an automobile is fascinating to me, and I have always wanted to work in the automotive industry (although I have been told it’s a death wish).

This project started as an idea when I was in grade 8, using Google SketchUp to slowly design a car, line by line. When I got to high school I learned about proper CAD software and stopped the project. In grade 10 I thought it would be cool to bring the project back to life, so starting with the original sketches I started carving out a block of clay. My hope with using clay was to be able to change the design and try new things fast. This is actually how a lot of car companies design their cars at first, by carving full-scale models of plasticine.

As seen above, after making a clay model I designed a custom 3D scanner to take a ton of photos from different angles, automatically. After taking 450 pictures of the car, I imported it into Autodesk ReCap and stitched the model together. Then this model was used as a template to resurface in Solidworks, using many 3D sketching and surfacing techniques. This surface model was tweaked until I was happy with the flow simulation results and the drag coefficient of ~0.28. Finally, headlights and tail lights were designed, wheels, grilles, and other details were added, and the car was ready to be rendered.

Overall, I learned so much from this project, and hope I can apply it to future projects and coop opportunities. I applied draft principles to sketching, learned how to model clay, studied and implemented 3D scanning, learned basic flow simulation, and greatly improved my Solidworks skills.