Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/820551
P E R S P E C T I V E | M AY / J U N E 2 0 1 7 51 LOGAN'S LIMO by Nick Pugh, Illustrator and Vehicle Designer As a car designer, I have always wanted to work on a futuristic road movie, so Logan was a dream job. James Mangold had a clear vision that the vehicles in his film be realistic and not distract from the characters or story. This posed a challenge for someone who loves to design wild, futuristic rides. When I would present a range of possible directions, he usually picked the most conservative version. Even though this was frustrating at times, ultimately, the most important thing is making a cohesive and believable movie. No matter how cool something appears to be, if it distracts the audience from the story, it is bad design. In this story, Logan has a job as a limo driver ten or twenty years in the future, so vehicles play an important role as both active set pieces and individual characters. The first order of business was to design the limousine he drives. The style of this Wolverine movie is a sort of noir Western, very gritty, R-rated and a bit dark. François really liked the idea of the vehicles being both futuristic and retro at the same time. We both shared a love of 1970s concept cars and big American boats like the Cadillac Eldorado, Chrysler Imperial and Lincoln Continental. We were also big fans of French cars, in particular, the Citroen SM from the early '70s. We also loved the minimalist masculinity of some mid-century furniture, such as the Barcelona chair, and we both drew inspiration from the Jacques Tati film Playtime. This DNA formed the core of the limo-design language, contrasted with some futuristic twists like high-intensity animated LED screens adapted as headlights and taillights. The limousine also had to be a practical stunt vehicle that does jumps, gets totally shot up, crashes through a big fence and drives at high speed across the desert terrain, so I always needed to think of the design as a practical production vehicle more than simply a pretty concept car. The engineering and practicality of the fabrication was to play an equal role to the look of the design. My process usually starts out with old-fashioned drawings on paper. In this case, I used black marker sketches of the vehicle in various views. Once François and Jim approved a direction, I went right to 3D, building a rough model in SketchUp ® . OK, before I go further, I know some of you vehicle designers reading this are wondering why SketchUp? It is for architecture and blocky stuff, you can't make complex automotive surfaces with it, right? Well, me being me, I tend to do things differently. I have developed a pipeline to use SketchUp to make swoopy, organic surfacing, and it works great. Once I was happy with the model, I rendered it using KeyShot and then touched up the renderings in Photoshop ® . After printing large-format final art, it was presented to the studio for final approval. All of this was being done in conjunction with the pursuit of a car company partner, so each round of designs had to be branded with specific company badging and styling for each meeting. Very fun! I also did a full- sized, side view, tape drawing in the main area of the Art Department for everyone to visualize the scale and proportions of this limo. The design was finalized in about four months from the start of the project—just the right amount of time to get the whole thing figured out, but not enough time to overwork it. At this point, I needed to create a Class A digital model based on my rough SketchUp design that could be used as a basis for the engineering and eventual full-sized 3D printing of the parts. This was done in ICEM Surf™ surface modeling software by David Robeson at Ghostlight Studio, where the cars would eventually be fabricated. As part of the process, a 1/5th-scale model was built that would better reveal the design direction in physical space. With all the high-tech digital visualization Top: The reavers' vehicle was a collaboration between Paul Ozzimo and Nick Pugh. The original design by Paul Ozzimo was modeled and rendered in Autodesk® 3DS Max, and then sketched over by Nick Pugh in Photoshop. Above: The main reaver truck was built on a Dodge RAM 3500.