That’s right, “vacation” (not sure what it was really) is over and it’s time to get back to it. This new project is inspired by the “concealed heel” boot design where a boot is designed with an internal heel that is much higher than the outside would suggest. The project I’m working on is basically a pair of stiletto boots that are constructed around the structure of a ballet boot, with an abbreviated and purely cosmetic toe box.

They are ballet boots pretending to be something else 🙂

Don’t judge them from the picture yet. It is a very early, very crude, test model. I’ve spent most of the time today tweaking my sketches to make it look right and I’m still not fully satisfied.

Real life birthday, 10 April, woohoo one more year!

…I’ll have pizza tonight to celebrate this non event 😀

I promised myself that after the cuffs I would take a nice long, one week break. Well look at what I’m doing when I’m supposed to relax from making things…

Yeah… I just make “other” things…

Free set of cuffs to the first person who guess the model number. (it may be missing bits here and there, still a work in progress)

I forgot to mention these, these received a couple of fixes, the ballgag still had a debug message showing when using the speech garbler and the thighs bands had a problem with one of the binding rings not glowing when clicked.

I also started deploying another general patch that fixes an issue with the paw mittens detection code.

Here we are, they are out, finally 🙂

They match the classic posture collar and the PonyPlay bridle and come with their own coloring HUD. The heavy padded lining not only make them look bulkier but also makes it much easier to adjust them to your avatar. They of course support all the standard cuff features of the TouchBound system and come with the usual padlock/RLV activator bundle.

Enjoy 🙂

As usual you can get them from the following locations:
The main in-world shop in Dead Realm.
The SecondLife marketplace.
The primBay.

I spent most of Monday redoing what I basically did last Monday, but at least the textures are all done. Now it’s scripting time!

After realizing that my stitches where way too big, I redid all the textures with smaller ones. I basically did Monday’s work all over again. But here is the result in SL! The lighting is a bit extreme, in order to showcase the materials, and I’ve put the posture collar in the shot to compare them. The stitches are still slightly bigger than on the collar, but it isn’t as much of a problem as it was before.

I finished all the textures (excepted one really) for the cuffs yesterday and did some experimentation on specular maps. I also cleaned up the model for upload in SL. I’m spending the day doing system upgrades on my servers and will get back to the cuffs tomorrow.

Now that my normal maps are all nice and clean, behold!

Now to get all the textures ready.

I’ve been silent for the past days while I was finishing the unwrapping and spent last night rendering the different textures for the leather cuffs.

I also had a long hard look at the normal map… it’s not very good. I have a pair of screenshots to illustrate it, but basically the edges are scattered with “glitch streaks” (let’s call them like that) that are, I believe, due to the hard edge they are sitting on. It’s not a big deal, really but it means that I have to go touch up the normal map by hand in Photoshop to rub those imperfections out. That takes time as there is a lot of them.

I’ve been on a roll today so I’ll try to keep on going until I’m too tired (I will then post another update).