Daniel Simon: Hi AREA, thanks for having me here!
I am a senior car designer from Germany, 31 years old. I have always had the desire to explore design beyond production packages. So, I started blending my car design work with influences from the entertainment design field. This process is highly creative and addictive. The results are retro-futuristic, yet believable vehicles. I ended up doing that almost on a daily basis now and think about creating a business around it. The first result is the book COSMIC MOTORS.

Daniel Simon: I am a petrolhead! Cars and vehicles are highly technical objects, but still able to create emotions in peoples' mind! That's unique. I have always been fascinated by that -- mostly cars and all other vehicles that have noisy engines, smell like fuel and travel at risky speeds. Designing them is the ultimate freedom -- whatever you have in your mind, you can bring it down on paper and share it with people. That's a fantastic feeling!

Daniel Simon: Mhm, I guess at first a truck driver and later on, a sailor. When I was seventeen, I decided on becoming a car designer and invested every minute in that dream.

Daniel Simon: In my childhood, I was constantly surrounded with drawings and began drawing at the age of two years old. My dad is an engineer, so at home we always had tons of paper and technical drawings flying around – it was a perfect environment for sketching! And my mum bought me any pen I wanted. As a teenager, I took special drawing classes after school, very artistic and traditional though.

Daniel Simon: At design studies I never paid attention to 3D classes, I almost hated it! The designs I saw looked stiff and lacked emotions big time. And some students tried to compensate their poor sketching skills with cheesy-3D renderings and lens flares. I didn't see any appeal in 3D software and went back to my sketch pad. That was around 1999. Only in my later job at Volkswagen in Spain did I meet talented 3D artists … and the technology had evolved too. I finally saw the potential and grabbed my Alias modeler's computer during his lunch break and studied the user manual. My first 3D model was built at the end of 2003 in Alias 9.0 – it was the tea pot from the user guide, and I ended up toggling it around for hours – I was addicted!

Daniel Simon: My first computer was the lovely C64, I spent weeks hacking in basic programs line-by-line. Around 1992, I upgraded to the Amiga 500, mainly to edit music. In 1999 it became serious – I spent all my money on a Pentium tower with a heavy 19" screen. At that time it was hip to scan your hand drawings and perform a fancy layout with text and graphics in Photoshop 5.0 for presentations.

Daniel Simon: In car design industry, your studies and the real world employment blend together. The first studio where I passed the magic security doors was in 1999 in the main VW studio, where the Bentley Hunaudières show car was assembled at the time. What a first contact!! My first real paycheck I got from the Europe Design Centre in Sitges, working on concept cars for Volkswagen and Bugatti. We went through the regular process again and again – sketch ideation on paper, package development, sketch design phase with colored renderings, quarter-scale model building with clay, digitalization and milling in full size for further development or car shows. A rollercoaster ride between ambitious project kick-offs and exhausting all-nighters before presentations -- daily business in concept studios and big fun. And GT battles on the cafeteria's Playstation, of course.

Daniel Simon: From my experience in various studios -- for the design process, it's mostly AliasStudio, for 3D sketching and sophisticated surfacing. That became a standard in car design. Later down the line, ICEM Surf kicked in. Data transfers to engineering are easily done by IGES formats, mostly to Catia or ProEngineer. Lately, real-time visualization has become a big thing. And more and more young designers sketch digitally, with Wacoms on Photoshop or SketchBook, and achieve amazing sketch quality.

Daniel Simon: Everything starts on paper. Sketching is my big passion. But once I see something with potential, I sketch it as soon as I can in AliasStudio with simple volumes. I basically proof my own pencil sketch. At that stage, I already have figures in the scene for scale reference. Rather than using draft views to start 3D, I prefer to simulate on screen (in perspective mode with toggle shade) the key sketches and renderings I have on paper. If the volume sketch translates the feeling of what I have on paper, I start precise surfacing. Sometimes, for my entertainment, I detail one piece of the vehicle while the rest of the model is still in design process...so there I lose a little efficiency for the sake of fun!

In car design studios, it's very different. Your digital design time is only one part of a very complex workflow of engineering, design, tooling and model crafting – all of it could happen in parallel. So your work becomes less artistic in comparison. Data is shared and exchanged all the time, and over on the designers' screen, many things happen in draft or section views, putting lines over package drawings and fighting for line tension over hard points.

Daniel Simon: Definitely. Ships have simple sleek skins, but the inside is crammed with rough machinery and a wild matrix of tubing and pluming. It's almost like a living organism. Also, most of my detailing helps to relate to the futuristic vehicles I design. You see that in Cosmic Motors. There is the Camarudo space ship for example, with its regular power cord charger. Or the Gravion racecar, with a rusty watering can on the side. And most cockpit switches are assimulated parts from 60's radios! Many of Cosmic Motors vessel have rivets - no cyber glue or nano technology! In the future! Mhmmm…it's like that: If everything is so futuristic, well, why would the pilot need a display or joystick? Wouldn't he just control the vehicle with his brain using mind control? Yes! But that results in an empty cockpit and viewers don't recognize it as a such anymore. So, I do include old-fashioned, real details to make my futuristic vehicles recognizable.

Daniel Simon: Motor sports! What a vast field of inspiration! The heroic pilots, the technology, the drama, the ladies, the competition, the victories and tragedies, the fashion, the graphics, the intrigues, the glamour. That all happens in both historic and today's motor racing – and I blend it with my design ideas. And women have always been fascinated by this glamorous world full of brave men, so they are a natural part of it -- as proud grid girls, as drivers wives clocking their husbands lap time, as models posing with the race machinery or piloting it themselves.

My design influence is hard to specify. Ideas happen with a pen on paper. And if I draw, I don't think too much, its just happens. Only later I could analyze what inspired me.

Daniel Simon: I use Maya to set up animations and to render with its mental ray plug in. I love final gather and HDRI. And dropping my AliasStudio-NURBS models into Maya works just fine -- layers, grouping and shader- assignments are kept. I replace all shaders in Maya and define the complex mappings. I am never happy with the tessellation, but by playing around with all these options I figure it out. And I always try to get the final look in the renderer rather then relying on Photoshop retouches. It's for sure -- when you are done -- you or your client want the same image again, but with a slightly different camera angle. Then your render setup effort really pays off.

Daniel Simon: There is no tool for everything. Maya is incredible. But for my NURBS modeling, I prefer the crispness of AliasStudio and the precise workflow I learned in car design. It's a lot about making highlights run nicely over surfaces.

Daniel Simon: November 2005 -- I just had quit my car design contract at VW to develop my kill in entertainment design. I got an email from Design Studio Press publisher Scott Robertson: "...I would love to talk with you about publishing your original vehicle designs in a book..." A student turned him on my website and it seemed like Scott liked it. The problem was that all the work he had seen online was low res, and that was all I had! And the book spread is full 7200 px! So I started from scratch with all my work, redrawing images and developing 3D models on a crazy detail level – because a book does not offer any motion blur to hide things. I created stories around the vehicles and decided on a book concept – showing each project from sketch to their photoreal finish. During the book making, I flew three times to L.A. to catch up with artists like Dylan Cole, Ryan Church or Syd Mead to tune my imagery. Filling 176 pages is a very long journey... and in parallel, I had to take care of my young business... two crazy years!

Daniel Simon: The Cosmic Motors journey continues! That's just the beginning. I have many more vehicles in my mind, and I want to realize them all. And with the evolving technologies at our hands, an individual designer can achieve more then ever, so we will see! So far, I continue working on the Cosmic Motors idea, which could also end up in another book one day. In parallel, I work intensely as a freelancer in the car design industry to pay my bills. But one day, I'd like to see my vehicles in a good director's movie thundering and screaming over the screen, oh yeah, that would rock...

Daniel Simon: I have big plans! But I am still thinking about it. Currently, I am just busy finding my niche in the crowded market of entertainment design. I want to position myself as an expert in sophisticated, conceptual vehicle design, for movies, games and real life. But I am patient and curious about what comes next. Sometimes, one single email can change your plans.