GKS-0451

grabcad

I approached this entry as a project for a fictitious client, FPSGEAR, Inc. They were interested in developing a high end esports mouse with a focus on the first person shooter market.We surveyed the leading competitors, the Razer DeathAdder, Logitech G502 and Glorious Model D-, and found that none of them captured the rugged feel of in-game equipment.After some quick concept sketching, I quickly moved into 3D to develop and iterate the overall form and ergonomics with quick and low cost FDM prints.I then brought this basic CAD model into Keyshot to develop colors, finishes and materials and create the feel of a battle-hardened weapon with interesting lighting effects. Imperfect colors and finishes that are worn on exterior corners communicate years of use, while internal lighting illuminates the perimeter.In the past this would have just been a rendering exercise, used along the way to creating a much more expensive visual model with CNC machined, painted and hand finished parts, or even prototype molded rubber components.But with Keyshot’s 3MF export and new Stratasys printers, we can go straight from rendering to tangible prototype. This allows for a much faster and much wider variety of color, material, texture and finish development, which enables deeper collaboration and brainstorming between clients, designers, engineers and manufacturers and speeds up the product development process.To take advantage of these capabilities, the GKS-0451 visual prototype CAD model is split into multiple parts, with options that can be mixed and matched. These include color, gloss and texture variations for housings, mouse wheel, rubber grip pads and applied graphics.Prototyping designs with variations in texture is normally a labor intensive process, since features need to be modeled in 3D CAD before prototyping or even rendering. Keyshot’s material graph saved even more time in this step, by allowing rapid iteration of complex displaced and procedural textures with varying roughness properties on relatively simple CAD models.At this point in the project we’re ready to print these parts in high resolution for a design review before moving forward with in depth engineering development. A picture is worth a thousand words, and a part is worth a thousand pictures.Housing material should be printed in rigid opaque material. Side grips and mouse wheel grip should be printed in 60 shore A rubber-like material. Hopefully surface gloss levels are captured in the .3mf format and can be printed accordingly.