I'm about to reach my limits of design/illustrative experience and need to take a few 2D vector illustrations into the detailed 3D world.

Just wondering if there's anyone here with experience, with something like SolidWorks, that might be willing to lend a hand?

My brother, Cybjorg does, but he always has 3-5 side jobs in the queue in addition to his regular full-time job.

That might be me.

32 yrs as a mechanical designer and still going!

What do you need? This is rendered with full alpha transparency. So no embarrassing halos when the background changes.

I suppose complexity is completely relative, but I can say that what I'm designing doesn't have an elaborate set of linking and moving parts.

I'm currently working on multiple views of a couple of USB devices and a couple of handheld remote controls. Top view, sides, ends, bottom. While these are great for general layout of things like buttons and ports, it's very difficult to properly portray fillets and chamfered/radius edges. Shading helps, but without the object being 3D it's all really a matter of manual interpretation.

I'm mostly interested in modeling the exterior of these designs right now, not necessarily the individual molded components that make them up. Nor the requisite bosses and other supports that plastic parts need internally. That should be able to be handled later by a contract manufacturer experienced with their processes.

What you are looking for is commonly called industrial design.

http://www.frogdesign.com/ is one of the more famous companies. Not a plug, they are just the first that came to mind.

Still if your design isn't too highly sculpted I can handle generating what you are looking for. PM a couple of sketches and I can be more positive about that.

I'm actually handling most of the industrial design. The current format of the illustrations is accurate down to the 0.25mm level (everything pretty much works out to multiple of). If I was proficient in some 3D modeling package I'd go the whole way myself. Unfortunately it's not something I have the time to learn at the moment, plus it may be more information than I will need going forward since I don't know when I'll ever have the time to devote to doing this end to end.

What I really don't have experience with is DFM, Design for Manufacturability, though I'm not completely clueless about it. So I do try to take certain aspects into account in the initial designs, such as features that might make an injection mold impossible, etc. But again, I don't need this at this stage yet.

I'll send you some comps later this afternoon. Thanks!

Arrgh.. Life has come up and delayed me a bit. Still need to make some edits to the illustrations, but I'll try sending you at least a preview of one item today.