Hasbro and Takara's toy making process

[DELTAprime]

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?

[DELTAprime]

OK, remembered Gizmods article on the subject of how they are currently made, altho I was under the impression from TFwiki and interviews that Hasbro doesn't design them beyond the concept stage and then Takara does the rest of the work.

[griffin]

The Hasbro tour in 2007 covered about as much as we know of the Transformers toy making process. But yes, the Hasbro people just do basic concept drawings and maybe some suggested transformation ideas... and TakaraTomy people engineer the hundreds of parts to make that possible.

[SMHFConvoy]

And before the even do concept drawings, they'll put together a story or mood board and that will have photos of things like vehicles or activities, (they make more than TFS) even photos of toys available from a competitor for inspiration or to give the designer an idea of what direction they want to go in e.g. when Hasbro started work on either Cybertron Optimus Prime they included a print out of a red Gundam Zaku as an idea of what they wanted; something big and bulky, with wide shoulders.