There is still lots to do: redo keycap, grip texture on knob too fine, switches lack detailing, microcontroller and OLED display missing.
I liked the render result of this piece, so I thought I’d share this, and start a WIP thread.
This particular render took 2 minutes and 43 seconds for 500 samples. The rendering device is a multiple GPU setup of an RTX A6000 and an RTX A5000.
When I start a render I like to turn off all post effects. This makes rendering noticably faster, already just the gamma application slows rendering down, not to mention adding more effects.
Here I used at the end the Intel denoiser, filmic medium contrast and default gamma setting at 2.2.
The switch model has a plastic material that I converted to PBR, then I added subsurface scattering to it. The bottom plate is glass material with IOR set to plexiglass, and clarity turned down. My actual keyboard has actually an acrylic sheet of the color type opal white, but this gets closest in term of rendering the RGB LED lighting that I have as underglow on my board. The streaks in the light on the flooring are actually shadows from screw elements at the underside - unfortunately the light transport isn’t working all that well in these cases. I like the result though.
Lighting is just the skylight set to intensity 0.4, the environment assigned is RDJ Window from the Rhino library. There are further 10 emissive meshes to play the role of the RGB LEDs.
I improved the model some, added: resistors close to the TRRS jack, the TRRS jack, the reset button, the rotary encoder under the knob and the Elite-C microcontroller.
Since there are two halves to the keyboard I have two rotary encoders.
On the right half by default it does mouse wheel up and down. Then there are some extra functions on several of the layers, like toggle RGB lights, adjust RGB light intensity and so on.
I just changed my firmware to no longer do the rainbow animation it used to have, so I’ll probably add to the left encoder maybe ctrl+left/right so that I can quickly select text when holding shift and turning the knob.
Since they also function as buttons the one on the left is the same as the windows key or GUI key on the mac, and the right one functions as AltGr (right alt).
I have currently one Rhino command added to my leader-key setup. So I press the LEADER then follow with MC and the keyboard will send TestMooCow followed by enter. Very handy in Rhino (:
I intend to add more Rhino commands to my firmware, still got 1000 bytes to fill on the controller now that I disabled the RGB animation.
