Archive for the ‘pet projects’ Category

This year’s Halloween mini-project has been going at a pretty leisurely pace. I was initially going to do something completely different, but I did not really want to make it a limited seasonal item. And then I remembered that “this” is actually something that was suggested to me a few times.

I wasn’t very inspired by the dirty/sweaty aspect initially, but I feel that the chunky drips coming from the collar really sell the idea. The text? I’m not entirely sure of. But I do feel that something like that is needed to really build the “story” this item should tell.

Does it need a story? In my mind, everything should, ideally. I feel that there might be something much better that I haven’t thought of yet, but I’m trying to avoid specific names or numbers.

Oh… I suppose it wouldn’t hurt to add a Chinese or Japanese option if the characters fit well enough… And maybe a color or two?

Not much real progress today, but I had to bash this floor cage thing to get it out of my head, and do some engineering on the door…

I don’t know where I’m going with this. 3x3m standard so far but that might be too square. The idea is that the ladder to climb in/out is the section of bars contained inside the hatch. Not sure of the depth either, the ladder doesn’t reach that far down.

We’re moving, we’re moving, now it’s time for the skin suit bra to get a bit of love. I’m not sure if that’s enough stitch lines for what it is.

Not shown: Collar is about 90% unwrapped, should I add more stitching or edge detailing or is that enough?

There is quite a bit of space left on the UV map, the metallic parts don’t “really” need texture or UV space given that they are plain chrome (although the strap eyelets will need a reasonable amount of it), and what little normal cleaning I need on them, I could just do at the vertex level.

I also forgot (again) to place the KDC logo somewhere… On the back, on one side of the bra, maybe?

I had some rest on Monday due to a minor eye-related injury I had to get treated. I was going to take another day, but I was getting bored. So I decided to work on the skinsuit textures & UVs, I’ve redone this nearly 3 times now, each time adjusting the texture width/height to try to get everything in at a reasonable resolution. That’s a lot of UV wrangling right there…

Hopefully the current size (512 x 2048) was a good estimate.

I ended up with a really simplified texture sheet that serves all the leather straps, something I’ve only really done on the Micro Bikini and a few other things (like boot laces) before. In essence there are 3 sections to it: Two end pieces and a seamless, repeating center part. Some of the connections that couldn’t be made seamless are hidden behind the retainer loops.

Eyelets will be done the same way I’ve done the back of rivet lately: A little piece of floating geometry and some alpha masking.

This is a lot of work, but it uses a ton less texture space, it will also be independently tint-able.

Oh yeah, and the VRChat handcuffs now blind their victim if they don’t comply with the required wrist position.

I spent nearly 3 days getting these to work. After much frustration and a mini stress breakdown, I ended up settling on a really crude position smoothing solution for when the cuffs are not attached to someone’s wrists (until I can come up with something better). Most of the interesting things aren’t implemented yet: Wrist position compliance (via screen blocking), audio/visual details, Cell Block Warden integration & preventing someone who has been cuffed from uncuffing themselves, but those would just get in the way of debugging.

Due to the way I’m keeping track of the cuffed person, it is probably, already world-rejoin proof, I should probably add that to the cell block cells too.

That’s about 10Ktri worth of geometry for the… body… part of the skinsuit (sin-suit?). I ended up rebuilding the collar twice because I wasn’t paying attention to what I was doing and ended up with 3 different versions of the strap retainers and two different ways of assembling them on the straps. That’s solved, but it took a while. The collar probably need some more geometry since it’s going to be rigged and need to follow the neck pretty tightly. Gloves & Stockings will mostly follow the leg geometry, so I’m not suuuper worried about them.

There are still some things I don’t like, as always.

I also made this neat cap thing… probably for the back of the feed gun, I’m trying to remember some of the tricks I learned before to make CAD-style models.

Not a lot to show today, but we are back working on the skin suit project, at last! I started work on the low-poly version, it is a bit slower than usual, but I’m trying to keep the repeating elements as re-useable as possible for texture optimization later, or at least, that’s the dream.

Also, there is this gun thing from last time and some kind of perma-shackle concept.

New features implemented on the handcuffs!

• Option to “tighten” the cuffs after self-cuffing.
• Click helper that can be made visible and shows up in “highlight transparent”.
• Suspension animations with adjustable wrist spacing & cuff position offset.
• Time lock support (basic).
• Config to have the bracelets open or closed when in the “unequipped” position.

There are so many configuration options now…

No sound in the video here as I’m having an issue with my screen recorder crashing when I do, so you’ll have to excuse me. FIXED

These are the sounds I’ve put together so far:

• Ratcheting sounds when the bracelets close (recording of my HC-01 handcuffs).
• A beep sequence when the LEDs come on and off (it’s like the 4th attempt at this sound now…).
• A servo-ish sound when the bracelets release.
• A single beep on lock/unlock after the lock/unlock sound.

The actual locking/unlocking sound is still the typical KDC one as I figured most people recognize this one anyway.

I also had to redo the offsets because the cuffs were actually upside down while in the back, which made the accessories look weird. But that’s a general issue with the TouchBound accessories sadly (Mitigating it a little is nice, still).

Tomorrow: Key animation, bento hand flexing, and some more config stuff (closing the bracelets when docked, or not?)

I was out of town earlier this week and the day I came back I ended up on a friend’s live stream (again). Fun, but exhausting.

I did my best to use the remaining time productively, but even now as I write this post, I still feel somewhat sick. Here is a bit of a summary of the work done on the new handcuffs, so far.

All of these use configuration cards, so that’s really on a “per avatar” basis:

• Tightness of the bracelets when the cuffs are closed.
• Wrist spacing when animated (front-cuffed only at the moment), this uses a bunch of animation variants effectively.
• A saved “position & rotation” for the front-cuffed and “unworn” state. (only read on script reset, manually moving the cuffs to a new position will be saved)
• Whether the cuffs should be visible, or hidden when in the “unworn” state. Most people will probably want them hidden, but a “nice to have”.

And those all update live, that’s kinda nice, but you do need to do this with the RLV mode disabled due to the no-edit restriction.

I ended up almost losing my mind hunting down what I assumed to be a major bug introduced during the (ongoing) PBR refresh of the system. But no, after 2 hours, it turns out the new LSL preprocessor I was using appears to have a bug that causes it to optimize out functional (and important) code.

I’ve also done some work on the VRChat version of the Cell Block D-5, and got a nice prototype of the media player. I even got my hands on some screen shaders (made by Noriben Lunch) to give each of the displays the right appearance (Trinitron aperture grid and an LCD panel… maybe the rack should also be a CRT tube… or a broken LCD?).