Archive for March, 2025

I’ve done quite a bit of work on the shackles, or more specifically, the

shackle & collar set.

I might have gone a little overboard with the collar, dimension-wise it it’s not quite as imposing as the meat market collar, but I’m still sticking with the “very loose fit” aesthetic, as long as the skull can’t get through, it works as expected, right?

Initially I was gonna use some round-head rivets on the outside for decoration, but the little diamond-head studs looked so much better. Problem is that on a collar that doesn’t use any welding, the only way to attach those is as rivets, or press-fitting them into the holes…

Which means that something sticks (at least a little bit) on the inside, and at this point I might as well make those into dull spikes. I know already that not everyone is going to like that (feedback told me this much) but I’m curious about everyone’s opinion on the matter.

I hope you like stirrup stockings… because unless I can get a better feel on the “full” stockings (I do not like what I’ve done so far), this is what I’ll end up shipping!

Okay, a lot of pictures today: gloves & stockings, I’m fairly happy with, everything need a little more creasing, probably.

I had more ideas for the prison map: why not replace the boring empty hard by an athletics track? Either completely underground, or with some meshwire above, for security? It definitely complicates the layout a bit, but it also adds more line of sight breaks, which is good! I just have to make sure there is at least one useful room accessible on each track section. Also in this post, a strange shower room that doubles as a bath, with giant high-flow monsoon-like showerheads I nicknamed “Deluge System”.

Also a brief update on the slave shackles (I might actually name them Morgiana shackles…), with some experimental, impact deformations.

I spent a bunch of time doing some weekend Blender work the past few days.

The first project of the weekendwas to see if I could build a kind of “body cage” that would be weightpainted to the body itself. Main issue was whether I could make the joints look somewhat believeable. As it turns out, the answer is “no, not really”, the knees are somewhat okay, but as soon as I get anywhere near the hip joints it quickly turns into a jagged mess. I know that hand painting the weights could solve some of those issues, but I sincerely believe this is one of those projects where the cage would have to be a static mesh that matches the body once it has been posed into place.

The pose I want also required fully weighted toe bones… Not something for today but I’ve learned a couple of new tricks.

Since the Second Life cell block keeps being a popular spot, I’ve resumed working on the “large” prison map with a new self-contained unit: The prisoner’s mess hall.

Like every other room I’ve done in this project, it’s meant to be relatively small compared to a more realistic one. Each cell block only has room for no more than a dozen prisoners at most. In my mind, one door is the entrance, one door is the exit, and the “kitchen” is on the other side of the wall where there would be an “Automat-style wall of small doors where prisoners would retrieve their tray. Not sure where the tray “return” should be.

At first, I thought of putting the table around a “light well” but I decided against it to keep in theme with the oppressive feeling: Windowless and a single table with a divider. The previous version only had 8 seats but we figured that prisoners don’t need that much elbow room and added an extra two. I might use the light well feature for the guard cafeteria or something.

Today I finally had a breakthrough with the skin suit gloves. Once I started exagerating the finger joints, knuckles and creasing the underside it sort of began clicking into place in my head. I’m thinking that mid-biceps, is probably long enough for this type of glove. I haven’t decided yet if I want to add some decorative cuff or trim to the edge, maybe a really simple detail strap or trim. I also have to make matching socks, so I probably shouldn’t overdo it.

There were some weird issues yesterday that made me extremely anxious last night: I STILL do not know what happened but connections to my server backend from SL kept failing, I couldn’t be sure if it was a problem on my end or not and ended up recompiling everything on the server box. I’ve also switched a bunch of the scripts around the dead realm region to use SSL because I was suspecting that the 301 redirects from http to https were the culprit.

It ended up going from dozens of connection failures yesterday to just one today, nearly 12 hours ago. I have no idea if it was my doing or if Linden Lab’s.

More progress on the slave shackle project!

I didn’t take a lot of pictures early on but I am quite impressed with what I’ve been able to do with the material. It’s one of those cases where you don’t want to know how the sausage is made I guess. It’s just weird that it looks so good for what it is.

I included the very first version of the material, which looked very “meh”. I’m usually bad with the “true color” of things and tend to make them a little too gray or black.

Super happy with the distressed look, the wear, and all the little dents that are covering the outer edges. I tried adding a concave bevel around the edge; A bit like a grinder would leave behind, but anything I do to that edge seems to make the cuffs look slimmer, and also removes most of the dents, so I’m going to leave it as is. I also made a version with a simpler interlocking hinge design, not sure which one to include in the final model. The simpler version makes “more” sense for this design but obviously doesn’t look as intricate.

Finally, I’m coding some sort of generic “auction” system. I’m not sure what I’m going to use it for yet, it’s just a prototype. I’ve spent most of my time on this little project trying to generate “pretty” bidding intervals.

What an embarassing update… I don’t have much to report today. All I can show is a tiny bit of low-poly work on the skin suit, and that’s not even what i should be working on at this time but that’s all I could muster.

Last night I did spend quite a bit of time on the beta grid to try the new Luau scripting environment. It’s interesting in a few ways: It seem quite fast, and I did a few object-oriented programming tests that could be useful in the future. I’m really rusty on Lua-scripting (the last time I did was in the early days of Gmod10) but it is certainly promising. The big issue might be when it comes to weird LSL quirks not being entirely handled by the Lua VM but they do map one to the other quite well.

I couldn’t do any memory usage tests as the functions appear to return fixed values.

I don’t see how they are going to allow client-side scripting in a way that is actually useful beyond client mods, but we’ll see.

Not what I had planned to work on, but the sci-fi handcuffs kept nagging me. I think I’m going to abandon the traditional ratchet design and go for a “rack and cogwheel” design, similar to what is used by Anhua HC-01 handcuffs. The idea is that the actual ratcheting mechanism is hidden and protected inside the body of the handcuffs, the bracelets interface with an intermediate cogwheel. Theoritically this makes it impossible to shim (more secure).

But in this case, it also looks really good in my opinion: far better than the ratchet teeth. I initially thought of using two gearwheel, but ultimately decided against it because it caused problems with rivet positions and the window for the lock’s colored shutter thing.

Having a video did so well last time (for the stunprod), sooo… I made another one for the Vergilius set. It’s… a bit questionable? We’ll see if booth ends up removing it, but it does make me wish that I could record some smooth VR choreography… I digress.

It is a fairly simple product feature-wise, I tried to build upon the prisoner shackle set and included a pre-made animator setup to show/hide the different cuff groups, saves you from making your own. Personally? I don’t use the included menu, I just have my clothes toggle the cuffs on/off directly to prevent clipping.

I also added a Poiyomi material set in addition to the standard shader setup and a couple more variants to save you from having to import the cuff set in Blender.

It isn’t made for any specific avatar in mind but unless you need to do something very specific, the ModularAvatar setup should get you sorted. Oh and if you want the locks to be smaller or the ring shackles to be bigger, you can just resize those bones in Unity, no fuss.

As usual for VRChat assets, head over to booth.pm if interested. Do message me on booth if you have issues/suggestions related to it.

Looking for the Second Life version? head over here.

Here we go again, yet another random project idea that I ended up pushing at the front of the queue this weekend.

It is based on an old sketch I picked up from somewhere… I’m not exactly sure where anymore. The hinge need to look more… functional, and the design seem a little too cramped to accomodate secure locks, but It very much has that “sci-fi high-security overengineered” vibe that I like.

Unrelated, but more important topic: I’m almost finished with the prep work of the Vergilius set for VRChat, the readme and license files are written (in 4 languages…), the booth storepage is more or less done. I’ll do a photo/video shoot tomorrow and it should be ready for release.

I gave the package to a couple people for testing, we’ll see if I get any feedback.