Jay Shuster, art director on Cars 2, walks Popular Mechanics through the intensive design process of spy car Finn McMissile, a new character voiced by Michael Caine.

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Cars 2, out June 24, features 150 new Cars characters from around the world, with 1050 variants for background scenes. And to scout out car designs for inspiration, art director and car buff Jay Shuster says, there's nothing quite like an epic road trip. "We took a 12-day, 15-city tour of Europe as a research trip. We took motorcycle rides through Paris and London, Stuttgart, Switzerland, Turin, Portifino—and we saw Fiat and Giorgio. It was crazy."

That research came in handy particularly when Shuster was designing Finn McMissile (voiced by Michael Caine), one key new character. In Cars 2, the stars of the original—Lightning McQueen (Owen Wilson) and Mater (Larry the Cable Guy)—leave their home of Radiator Springs to compete in the grand prix. Along the way, they encounter McMissile, a suave spy, and become wrapped up in a case of international espionage.

The voice of Michael Caine certainly helped give the character an air of 1960s cool. But the look of the car had to be just right, Shuster says, and there is always at least a kernel of an idea of what a character will be like. "Finn was going to be this super-understated British superspy, in the realm of 1960s British sports cars. And we knew he was going to be equipped with spy gear."

Shuster began by pasting up inspiration on his office wall. The space was covered with pictures of two-seat British cars with long hoods, but there were some Italian cars up there, too. (Shuster wouldn't reveal which cars he specifically used. "We refer to these designs as Pixar in-house plans," he told PM.) "British cars tended to have really simple belt lines and contours," he says. "We wanted to infuse a little more Italian into that. That's why I created a rear hip, which gave that fin a place to live. We take the best from all worlds and try to distill it down into the quintessential 1960s sports coupe."

Once director John Lasseter weighed in on what he liked, Shuster began to sketch. "I start real simple, even just 10 lines to define a shape, to see if that works with eyes and a mouth," Shuster says. Designing the character took a year and a half. "We spent 10 months nailing down his body shell, perfecting those forms," Shuster says. "That's from rough sketch through tons of iterations of piles of drawings. I was drawing a lot of side views—it was the best view to show the front to rear, very curvaceous, very nice lines." When Lasseter signed off on the side design, Shuster drew the front and rear views of the car. "Finally, we ended up with a three-view orthographic [a 3D projection in two dimensions] that's pretty much the final design." That orthographic went down to modelers, who put together a simple digital 3D line drawing of the car to show Shuster whether the design worked in real space.

With the basic car shape taken care of, Shuster and the animators had to figure out where to hide Finn's spy technology—grappling hooks, spy camera, missile launcher, glass cutter, harpoon gun and deployable surveillance probes, among other fun gadgets. "We didn't want him to transform or change into a different character when he's using his gear," Shuster says. "Of course there's some transformation because these things don't just fit—[for example, we added a] side vent on his front 3/4 panel that we pushed his machine gun out of. There's some cheating as well, but the animators get a hold of it, and they turn it into a whole different beast. They make these things work, and they make them appear to work very logically just by the way they make things unfold."

The last steps in the design process, the shade and design of the car's paint job and the character of the chrome, weren't just technical concerns. They were crucial to making the cars both characters capable of emotion and believable vehicles. And the same level of detail goes into every car in the film. "We'll even put grease marks around bolts, because we're totally pondering every little thing," Shuster says. "There's a lot of engineering in these cars. How these characters emote has to do with their suspension, and how they gesture with their front tires and wheels. ... These cars are metal, but they're also elastic. So we're always treading the fine line between absolute functionality and emoting. We don't want these things to be strange beanbags, always moving and shifting."

With the final details done, Finn McMissile certainly fits the part of superagent; he looks a lot like the Aston Martin DB5 that Sean Connery drove as James Bond in Goldfinger. And Shuster says that the end of the project, when the correct lighting is layered in and the character voices are added, is like Christmas for him. The art director grew up in Detroit with a car-designer dad and went to school for industrial design, and Cars 2 was a dream gig particularly because Lasseter shares Schuster's passion for nailing the details. "Before I got this job at Pixar, I was like, I'm going to go design some characters, but I never fully understood what it took," he says. "John is all about getting the car culture right, so people who do know about a detail like flame jobs will identify with them. Coming from car culture myself, and understanding engineering in these cars and how certain cars look—I'm totally using everything I learned during my education on these characters."