Author Topic: Designing custom keycaps  (Read 2418 times)

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Offline hoothoot

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Designing custom keycaps
« on: Sun, 23 October 2016, 10:54:04 »
Hi,

Long time lurker here. I'm finally going take a stab at designing my own custom keycaps set. I've contacted Signature Plastics for a quote but they said I needed to send them the specifications of the keycaps first. I have a couple of questions that you experienced veterans might know:

1. What are the other possible vendors? Sig Plastics have pretty good quality, but price point might be an issue. And I don't think the font I'm going for will suit SA, DSA, nor DCS.

2. What are some helpful tools to design the keycaps? I know of Matt3o's Keyboard Color Chooser http://lab.cubiq.org/kbcc/#WFK,NN,WFK,NN but was wondering if there are other useful tools to visualize the keycaps better, especially how it looks 3D.

3. Other things to watch out for while designing the keycaps?

Thanks!

Offline zslane

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Re: Designing custom keycaps
« Reply #1 on: Sun, 23 October 2016, 13:09:43 »
If your design is for spherical top keycaps, then Signature Plastics is your only option. If not, then GMK seems to be the most common choice.

As for tools, I recommend becoming as proficient with Adobe Illustrator as you can. Especially if you plan to design novelty legends. Moreover, SP likes it when you can deliver your design to them with their Illustrator template. I don't know what GMK prefers, but I'm sure they like Illustrator files too. I've found that there are far fewer opportunities for scale errors when you give them proper vector graphics files (and no, SVG does not count).

For presentation, you can use www.keyboard-layout-editor.com, but that is really only sufficient for getting the initial concept across in order to begin getting community feedback. Almost immediately people will start clamoring for photorealistic renders, particularly if they like your idea, so be prepared to start uploading pretty 3D renders as soon as you can.

Offline hoothoot

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Re: Designing custom keycaps
« Reply #2 on: Mon, 24 October 2016, 12:01:38 »
Thanks for the recommendation! I'm now in communication with GMK and they're going to help me out on this. I'm decent with Illustrator so that shouldn't be too much of a hurdle. But as for 3D renders of the keycaps, what programs would you recommend using? And possibly resources to learn just enough for keycap designing (I feel like this doesn't exist though >_<)

Thanks!

Offline zslane

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Re: Designing custom keycaps
« Reply #3 on: Mon, 24 October 2016, 12:42:29 »
When it comes to 3D DCC software, I don't really know what passes for hobbyist (i.e., affordable) software these days. I suspect that if you took an informal survey of the few folks who do this you'd find that no two artists use the same tool. But I also suspect you'd find that almost all of them use/used 3D software as part of their professional day jobs. So unfortunately, I don't really know where you'd go to learn the necessary skills (and in any event, it wouldn't be a very quick or easy process--high-end 3D software tends to be monstrously complex stuff).

The upshot of this is that if you don't already have the necessary software and skills, you'll probably have better luck reaching out to someone like thesiscamper to do renders for you, than tracking down inexpensive software and learning it from YouTube videos or something.

Offline hoothoot

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Re: Designing custom keycaps
« Reply #4 on: Mon, 24 October 2016, 15:52:12 »
Ahh, that was what I feared when I heard about 3D models. I'll get in touch with thesiscamper and see what we can come up with. For now, I think I'll just design it on illustrator, and just invest a couple thousand dollars to get the first prototypes.

Thanks!

Offline zslane

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Re: Designing custom keycaps
« Reply #5 on: Mon, 24 October 2016, 15:55:49 »
I think I'll just ... invest a couple thousand dollars to get the first prototypes.

Um, what do you mean by this exactly?

Offline Niomosy

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Re: Designing custom keycaps
« Reply #6 on: Mon, 24 October 2016, 18:13:54 »
Hey now, we might have Devlin as a spherical cap producer.  The one down side I've read is that the caps are a bit tighter fit than SP caps.

Offline Puddsy

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Re: Designing custom keycaps
« Reply #7 on: Mon, 24 October 2016, 18:55:14 »
Hey now, we might have Devlin as a spherical cap producer.  The one down side I've read is that the caps are a bit tighter fit than SP caps.

Reason being that they're not meant for enthusiasts and more meant for industrial applications. DSA used to have the same problem.
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