The recent drawings released by the former Takara designer have shed a bit more light on how Transformers are made for me but it was still a bit mysterious till I did some searching tonight.

My understanding right now is someone does an artistic concept, which is then used to base an engineering concept on.

From there what do Hasbro and Takara do next? From what I've found tonight it looks like there are two different ways to go from sketch to mold. First is design the toy using clay and using that to make prototypes and then the final molds. The other is to use CAD to design the toy, print out prototypes and then CNC the final molds.

So do they use clay to design it or CAD. And if it's CAD did they ever make Transformers using other techniques or has it been CAD since Diaclone?