Modeller for hire · UK · Worldwide
A freelance motorcycle design modeller — in VR.
Twenty-five years of clay craft, now sculpting production-grade bodywork at full scale in virtual reality. A modeller and design partner for OEMs, consultancies and the designers who hire one.
Start a conversationBehind every resolved motorcycle there is a modeller — the person who takes a designer's sketch and an engineer's package and reconciles them into a single, buildable form that still makes your pulse jump. It is a craft, and a quiet one. For a century it lived in clay. I spent the first two decades of my career there, hand-sculpting full-size models of motorcycles and cars, learning the only lesson that really matters: a surface is right when it looks right at full scale, in real light, to a human standing in front of it.
Since 2020 I have carried that craft into virtual reality, and it has made me a better modeller than clay ever could on its own. I work as a freelance modeller and design partner — sometimes on a single programme, sometimes embedded with a studio for the long run, often training a team to do it themselves. The constant is the standard: nothing leaves the headset until it would survive being walked around in the real world.
Who you'd be working with
I'm Nick Graveley, founder of Sculpt 3D — an award-winning motorcycle designer and experienced clay modeller, and a Gravity Sketch Certified Instructor. Over twenty-plus years I've sculpted dozens of full-size clay models, and since 2020 I've been one of the people leading the move of that craft into VR for the motorcycle industry.
My job, as I see it, is to empower designers: to balance their direction against the technical and tooling reality and sculpt beautiful things that actually work — in the most efficient way possible. I like to make cool shit with cool people.
How I work with a design team
The best modelling has always been a duet between a designer and a modeller, and VR makes that duet possible from anywhere. Your designer and I share one full-scale model in the same virtual space — beamed in from different cities or countries — and resolve it together in real time. We grab the form directly, draw curves in the air to make a point, shrink to ant-scale to check a clearance, then step back out to read the whole bike from across the room.
That removes the thing that quietly wrecks modelling jobs: the lossy game of telephone between a designer describing a change and a modeller interpreting it on a flat screen. When you can both see and touch the same model at true size, intent and outcome finally line up. Misunderstanding has nowhere to live.
In the designer's words
See selected work →"Nick has been the first to show me that VR-modelling thing — and seriously, what has been seen cannot be unseen. It feels like we are there together, exactly like before, around the clay models. It's just mind-blowing."
Common questions
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What does a design modeller actually do? +
A modeller turns a designer’s intent into a resolved, buildable three-dimensional form. The designer sets direction and emotion; the modeller balances that against engineering hard-points, package and tooling, and sculpts the surfaces to a level of craft and control the design can be built from. Good modelling is the bridge between a beautiful sketch and a beautiful, manufacturable object.
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Can I hire you for a single project, or only ongoing work? +
Both. Some clients bring me onto a specific live programme to model alongside their designers; others engage me to train their internal team; many start with one project and continue. The engagement is built around what your studio needs to prove the value first and integrate it second.
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Do you work remotely with our designers? +
Yes — that is one of the quiet superpowers of VR. Your designer and I beam into the same virtual space from different countries and work the same full-scale model together in real time, grabbing it, annotating it, drawing 3D curves in the air. The Brixton Storr concept was modelled with the designer in Austria and me working remotely, and it debuted at EICMA.
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What are your credentials? +
I am Nick Graveley, founder of Sculpt 3D: an award-winning motorcycle designer and clay modeller with over two decades hand-sculpting full-size models of motorcycles and cars, and a Gravity Sketch Certified Instructor who has pioneered VR modelling for the motorcycle industry since 2020–21. I currently work with some of the world’s leading motorcycle OEMs.
Got a bike that deserves this?
Tell me about the project. Whether it's one programme or a long partnership, it starts with a conversation.
Start a conversation