Add Switches & Stabilizers

Occasionally you may want to have visible switches and stabilizers in your render. This may be because you are rendering at a low angle or have transparent keycaps or simply may want to turn the keycaps off altogther to show off the board.

Start by opening up the collection that the keyboard is in and duplicate (linked) the keycap/layout collection. These are going to become our switches.

Turn off the visibility for the original keycaps collection so we can focus on what will become our switches.

Right click on the switch collection and choose “select objects”. Make sure you have one of them active (highlighted), if not, shift+click one of them in the 3d viewport to make it active. Now type the word ‘switch’ into the object data dropdown and choose either Switch_Simple or Switch_Complex depending on your needs.

One of them changed into a switch. You can now make all of them into switches by pressing ctrl+L to bring up the Link dialogue then O for Object Data. You should now have a full board of switches.

Now let’s add the stabilizers. Select a switch that needs to have a stabilizer accompanying it and duplicate linked using Alt+D. Right click or escape to cancel the movement.

With that new switch selected, open the Object Data dropdown and type ‘stab’ to filter to the stabilizers. Again, choose whether you need it to be the simple or complex model and the size and orientation of the stabilizer.

Do this for the rest of the stabilizers and you’re done.