Brandon Wehenkel: Mouse

 Ghosted Black

Colored

Concept:  Logitec Trackball mouse.  The one I was using while creating it.  I've grown accustomed to a trackball mouse and feel that any other mouse is weird.  But I didn't want to use the tutorial because it wasn't precisely the shape I was looking for.  The real Logitech mouse is a lot more curved.

Keyshot 1

Modeling Techniques:
I used loft to make all 30 curves. Then I painstakingly spent 19 hours straight moving individual control points to make the shape it is in.  After the first 5 hours, I felt like I had made a huge mistake to design the mouse this way.  And I spent the rest of the time struggling with its wobbliness,  I know there has to be a better way to do it.  So it might be lumpy due to this fact.  I used my lofted curves to make the buttons by using projected curves and extrudeSrf.  I just created a sphere for the trackball.
Also because I had such a hard time making this design, I couldn't figure out how to do the buttons right.  I didn't really like how they looked merged into the object, but I did the two main buttons just to signify it were a mouse and didn't put the scroll wheel or the mouse button 3 and 4.  I had a hard time getting the curves to not merge into each other around the sphere. Due to the loft curves around the sphere not cooperating I wasn't able to make a fillet edge on the bottom of the mouse..  I initially had a curve that was meant to be the fillet, but I couldn't get it to work with the inset trackball.  I had already spent 19 hours. I probably would have needed to spend another 10 more hours just getting the fillet edge.
The sphere is not protruding through the object.  It is "hovering" inside the holder.  Hovering because thats the closest I could manage to simulating something clicking/fitting exactly inside its the spot.

Sphere Spot Detail

Keyshot 2

Materials:
Hard Black Plastic. Hard Black Plastic Shiney. Clear Shiney Blue Plastic, then changed the Diffuse Transmission: since I wanted to make the sphere clear it would have used the same color of the plastic underneath; that wasn't something I was going for.

Keyshot 3