Archive for March, 2025

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.