The Portfolio Of Raphael Rau

"SLV SA-Keyboard"

Lately I have been investing some time with in depth research on mechanical keyboard and really started to like the subculture.

Credits:
Cornelius Dämmrich, for modeling the Parker pen.
Kevin Yu, for providing the Cherry Switch CAD model.

Maxime Roz, for his interior HDRI sets.

Tech Specs:
Modeled in Maxon C4D R19
Textured and shaded and rendered in Otoy Octane Render
Rendered in 4K 3840 X 2160 px.
Render time was around 20 min on 8 GPU´s (5 X GTX 1080Ti, 3 X GTX 980Ti)
3 Light sources (HDRI + 2 accent lights)
Diffuse Depth 16
Glossy Depth 32
The long render times are due to the glass / legos was left to spread real caustics (no fake shadows)

SLV SA-KEYBOARD A

Since I could not find anything that comes close to what I was searching for on the market the idea was to design a keyboard that I myself would buy ans / or built. With the exact key caps, switches and form factor I like.

SLV SA-KEYBOARD B

I felt hesitant to create one of those 60% keyboard layouts, that are enormously popular in the mechanical keyboard community. This is because I need those F keys and a nice numpad for my daily work as 3D Artist.

I still wanted it to be somewhat portable, so I split the keyboard and the numpad into two parts.
Another reason I did my own design was, that there are no tenkeyless keyboards with seperate numpad that match design language.

SLV SA-KEYS Wallpaper

Since I like the retro SA (Spherical All) form factor keys I used the Signature Plastics model as template to get the correct measurements but then altered the design to look more like older SA sets from the Commodore and the prestigious Space Cadet keyboard.
So I name those the SLV-SA Keycaps

SLV SA-KEYBOARD Studio A

The color, because I like simplicity, is an inverted dolch scheme. While searching the web for Ideas I really liked the front printed special functions on the Vortex Core 40% I did my own spin on it, putting all shift key characters as front print on the keycaps.

SLV SA-KEYBOARD Studio B