First off, I’m so glad you saw the entire project and took interest in seeing how I designed this product!
Here, I’ll showcase my sketches, and also give an insight into my thought process.
The original brief was to design a torch for a company of our choice. The deliverable had to be just a detailed digital render, either sketched or modeled.
I decided to make a Photoshop render of the torch, shown below.
I later thought it would be a good idea to detail out this product a little more. If nothing, it would help me get a hang of SolidWorks, which I was still figuring out.
As customary, I started with sketching concepts, shown below.
The main visual cues I took from the B+D product line was the usage of Red (Gloss), Black (Matte, usually), and Metallic in their products. Black was usually reserved for handles and grips and Metal for the areas that required metal (power tool components). The usage of highly contrasting colours aims at highlighting the target audience, i.e., domestic DIY usage mainly, as well as trying not to camouflage the product.
The products are built to look rugged, reliable/hardy, intriguing, relatively futuristic, and in ways, muscular, like their users.
There’s a sense of raw sexuality/power in the colour red. I’ve never figured out why. It isn’t limited to any gender, though. Even though bright red lipstick can be classified as probably one of the most ravishingly sexy feminine colours, the same colour is the trademark of Old Spice, a classic manly product.
The reason I went with the mini portable torch rather than the flashlight or the headlamp, was because The B+D catalogue was filled with heavy duty torch lights and fog lamps and sporting lights. It seemed only fair to choose something that was unique in its own category.
Modeling the torch in Solidworks took an estimate of 3 nights plus almost the entire weekend to detail out the inner parts.
Below you can see how the model was earlier, before I decided to redo the grip and a few other details.
Reflector Cup
Adding materials in Keyshot were relatively a breeze. The pattern on the reflector cup (left) is of course, a bump-map, instead of a moulded texture. Getting the LEDs to mimic actual light was a bit tricky, because of the different light material options in Keyshot.
At the end, I just set the material to emissive, and played around with the intensity values till I got something I could work with! There are 8 LEDs behind the reflector, at an intensity of 65 (value set in Keyshot). The plastic component in front of it scatters the light in this concentric pattern, so the light is more uniform. It also helps reducing the glare.
A lot of the renders I took had custom environments where I played around with the HDRI Editor in Keyshot. I’ll make these available in the time to come!
Another thing I was excited to talk about was the KeyshotVR (The 360 degree rotating image, at the bottom of the project). This is an underused and underrated feature that is absolutely amazing if executed well! As you can see, the software stitches together images to create a rotatable model in your browser. I used this a lot during my project with Notion Ink to help my superiors get a holistic view of my product without me having to take multiple renders in various angles. This is the first time I’ve tried uploading a VR online, and I’ve been getting wonderful responses from the people who’ve viewed them! (For some reason, some of you may get pop-up advertisements when you open the VR. Not to worry! I’m still looking for a reasonable platform to host my files…)
This brings me to the end of my post. There were a few renders that looked wonderful, but could not be used in this project. You can find them below.
Thank You for going through this entire article! You can click HERE to go back to the Mini BrightBar Project.
Sarang Sheth 