Hey, everybody! It's Norm, from tested.com, here at DesignerCon 2017
Now, something I never expected to find at DesignerCon,
but, in retrospect, makes a lot of sense are custom keycaps.
Now, meet Robert here. Robert, you run flat keys and that's-- that's you, essentially. That's me. Yeah right solo and my wife
helps me a lot, but you know. And you
make keycaps?! Yeah, I mean I-- ahh--
I zbrush
keycaps. I 3D print them and I hand paint them and I sell them online to
people who use mechanical keyboards. Are-- are you mechanical keyboard nerd yourself? Yeah, I think I have nine keyboards.
Nine of them?! This is one of yours. Yeah. And you have some at your booth. Yeah. What's your favorite?
What's your what's theirs minimalist style? Um... I actually use a real force. It's a topre keyboard.
It's best for typing on so that's the one I use for like my live streaming and things like that.
But I think the minivan is probably my favorite looking keyboard this. I love the look of it
I feel like the reduction is like very in right now. Right, yeah. Oh, yeah. The four rows and that's it. You don't need all that garbage.
Yeah, but you also need a custom Escape key. Right? Yes, yes. That's what everyone needs in their life,
even if you didn't know it what was the first keycap you modeled?
It was the booby cap. Ohh yeah?!
Yeah, so the the booby cap here. It's a you know just a boob, you know, and I posted it online and
Kind of an experiment really I wanted to see if my anatomy skills
I'm a 3D sculptor by trade doing people and things like that so I
wanted to see if people would be interested in like really high quality
anatomy and other art pieces and
I posted it out there, and they kind of I mean for what it was it went viral for me
and it completely launched my company. Now, when you were doing that
were you printing the same quality where the-- you were still modeling. It wasn't hand sculpted.
Yeah. Like has the has the 3D printing technology improved enough from back then?
Did you have to cast
in molding cast?-- No, so all of my products are directly 3D printed like I print out 16 key caps at a time
Every 12 hours, so my entire production is printing based and... What resolution? 25 micron-- yeah.
On the form, too-- yeah. So SLA it's really clean. Yeah, for sure. There's no cleanup on any of these keycaps. Oh! At all?
Well, on the bottom of the keycap. Yep.
I mean you really can't see it. Usually there's a little like spikes that you would see on a traditional SLA
So you always put out a literally yes, they're always printed flat, and I sand it off in three or four seconds
And it's clean and a lot of these keycaps would actually require
multi-part molds, and I don't want to deal with any of that mess. The print is clean.
It's perfect for my needs. Do you feel any restriction in terms overhangs? Like something like this?
There's just a lot of negative space. Look at the- look at the- look at the
zygomatic arch in its cheek. You can see through it! Right, yeah. How would you cast that? Yeah.
Yeah.
You don't. And so does that have a support there at all? No no no no because of the way you orient the the 3D prints
themselves
actually affect the quality and
it affects what you can and cannot print so it takes a little bit of R&D to get like the best quality print per keycap.
And so sometimes I have to like turn it a certain way to make it so that it doesn't have support
Like this one is a good example, too. You can see through a lot of the pieces in here. Yeah.
And because it's all oriented up,
I'm able to print it without any supports affecting the design.
The design is the number-one thing for me, so I don't want it to be a limiting
Factor to have to cast it or to print it
Poorly or anything like that. Now, in terms of design,
you said the first keycaps you did were like a test of your anatomy skills. Yeah, exactly. And I see a lot of portraits...
Yeah. What are the things your experimenting with now?
Well, I've been doing some that actually have moving parts.
So this is my Necronomic cap, and it actually opens and closes. Woah! Hinge! So it's hinged.
You know I'm using piano wire as the hinge
And you know it took me a lot of printing attempts to make the diameter of the hole go all the way through
SLA tends to warp a bit and a smaller scale so even if I have a perfect hole in zbrush
You know I go and try to assemble it in the holes like off like a micron
And it doesn't work, so I had to do it a few times to get it to work, but so moving parts are things--
things that are partially clear in the center. This is actually a two-piece key cap that's been glued this way
It's like if you have LEDs on your keyboard the lights come through. Right!
Also, this one here has a hole all the way in his eye
Yeah. All the way to the back, so if you have an LED keyboard you get the light little bright things. Very Goonies!
Yeah, yeah totally Goonies. Yeah, so these are the types of things I'm experimenting with
You know, I always tried to raise the bar personally,
artistically. Are you also experimenting with different types of like flexible resins? I see clear resins.
So, all of my caps come as a clear. Clear actually has the best
strength properties apparently from formlabs at least from what I understand, so it's the strongest resin,
which is really good because people really do use my key caps. Like some people do whole rows.
Yeah, yeah. And I don't want them breaking and so they're very strong and
I've tried the flexible resin. Yeah. And it doesn't work yet for me
but I
I really wanted to, so one day
maybe I'll figure that out. Does the community come to you make requests you like say, "You gotta do this?"
Yeah, yeah. What's a very popular request?
Man, I mean people people actually usually don't request something specific
but they often say, "Do you do custom keycaps for me, and I and I try to say, "no,"
but I'm just trying to be kind because I don't want to tell them something like it's gonna cost
Five hundred dollars to do one keycap for you and make them feel bad. All right.
Actually, a lot of people request this twitch cap that I did and
but that's just like some some of these key caps I just do for me
just because I can. I can do-- I can sculpt anything I want. I could print anything I want. That's... incredible.
That's the idea. And do you think of it like that's your small canvas, right?
Yeah, absolutely. Your three quarter inch by three quarter inch canvas. All of this stuff is templated in my ZBrush
And I just have a little sketchbook on me
I designed the key cap you know based on like if I'm a fan of a franchise
I try to do something like inspired from their world
Or if I just have like an idea like like the butt cat the ASCII
Yeah, a little pun there. You know. It's just like I just design it and do it
Yeah, so it's 100% creative freedom. I think it's like what I was seeking in a in a career choice for me
and this medium allows me to do 3D printing, allows me to do sculpting and art and
functional things and do it all in one place. And run your own small business! And run my own small business.
Yeah, it's awesome. You know we're both from the Bay Area, we're both missing out on a really cool keyboard meetup. I know right?!
It's crazy! So it's fun to run into you yeah at DesignerCon, in Pasadena.
We can still geek out on keyboards. Yeah, man. Roberts Brick. Thank you so much for having me. Oh yeah. Thank you