Chris Hudik : Nos clients, un couple avec un enfant, ont choisi cet appartement pour son emplacement idyllique au centre de Manhattan, dans le quartier de Chelsea et avec vue sur la Highline. Il s’agissait d’un duplex neuf mais finalement plutôt banal. Malgré les jolies finitions dans les salles de bains, le reste de l’appartement était assez standard et manquait de personnalité. Lorsque je regarde le résultat final, notamment le corridor d’entrée tout en acajou, les encadrements de porte en bois courbé et la cuisine en marbre etacier inoxydable, j’aime imaginer qu’il s’agit de l’appartement d’une famille d’Ewoks (Star Wars), si ceux-ci avaient vécu en paix pendant des millénaires, et qu’ils avaient développé au fil du temps une esthétique simple et raffinée, inspirée de leurs interactions avec l’espèce humaine.

Between projects I made a set of renders for Clichés-OG40, the first keyboard from the new studio Cosmos Design. This entry shares the procedural thinking behind them. Other software and renderers use different controls, but the logic carries over.

The node tree below is for one row of caps — the Z row — split into the four areas that follow.

The caps in a row are clones built from render instances, which keeps the scene light for both caps and switches. All legends live in one 13,000 × 1,000 px greyscale PSD — thirteen 1,000 px tiles that stay easy to edit.

A Distorted Mesh UV texture projection reads the instance ID. With Instance Range set to a maximum of 13, and UVW Transform to S.X 13 and T.X −7, the first clone reads the first tile and each next clone shifts one tile to the right.

Saving resources is only a side effect. The real point is what this enables in step 03: randomising every single cap.

Adding sub-surface scattering makes the plastic read as translucent rather than painted. The difference is strongest in backlight — less obvious from this camera angle.

Distorted Mesh UV only works with the default mesh UV projection. An OSL projection — Triplanar Rnd UVs by Raphael Rau — removes that limit: give offset and rotation a range, then let a random value or a map move each cap within it. Every clone in the group now carries its own variation.

With procedural textures, a close-up no longer falls apart, so keycap designers and renderers can push an idea further.

A vertex map splits the base cap into two zones: a heavily textured top and a smoother side. Used as a greyscale mask between two texture maps, it gives the DCS profile the coarse top and smooth wall of the real part.

This is a way of thinking, not a finished keycap design, and it has gaps: there is no internal cap structure, so the surface reads as dye-sub; the texture and legend accuracy are not yet true to the real part.

If it helps one keycap designer try a new material or process without being held back by rendering, it was worth writing. Every render here was made — and this entry written — on a 40% keyboard.