Concept Gaming mouse

grabcad

This gaming mouse (believe it or not), was inspired by a rock that I found while on a hike. Its unique shape and half stealth fighter-esc appearance resulted in me keeping it and I finally ended up designing after it. It's not every day that inspiration comes from nature, the smooth or rough flowing shapes of trees or rocks are difficult to imitate with normal means of production, up until now. With the rise of 3d printing, design and engineering can go hand in hand. The production of a product that would have taken years can now be designed on a computer and printed within a day. Man and machine co-operating to bring about a new era of design and engineering, giving the designer more freedom and the prototype a new look at a fraction of the development time. I took advantage of the multi-material capabilities of 3d printers and designed a mouse that not only looks cool but is designed to be ergonomically conformed to one's hand. Using a combination of dark black, matte black, clear, and white frosted plastics and a few carefully placed LEDs this mouse represents the next generation of 3d printing and gaming tech. This mouse could be printed as one piece as opposed to injection molding. This gives it added strength and rigidity, I am also utilizing generated support material within the mouse as a form of added strength and have intentionally left it open to allow the slicer to work its magic. This mouse was designed to be wireless with a charging port located in the back portion akin to the exhaust of a sports car. The sweeping thumb cradling wing not only looks cool but provides comfort with minimal drag. The mouse wheel is designed to be made of metal coupled with an optical sensor and a magnetic ratchet for high precision scrolling. Two side-mounted illuminated buttons can be mapped to whatever function a user can desire. My goal with this mouse was to take my CAD modeling skills to the extreme. I rarely draw anything out, I start working and visualize the idea as I go. I added a few tributes to my car designs that can be found within this mouse. This was also my first time working with Keyshot, I got my hands on an RTX 3070 which was not supported by my usual render. Oddly enough I managed to crash Keyshot around six times simply due to me running out of VRAM. But when it worked, it worked amazingly (as you can tell by the renders above). Keyshot far outclassed SolidWorks visualize (my default renderer) in both realism and texture / bump mapping availability. Although it took some learning (random guessing) it managed to spit out some of the best looking renders that I have ever seen. I believe that I am merely scraping the surface of its pure rendering power with this project. And am definitely looking forward to giving it more of a challenge.