Here it is, brand new update for Kinky Studio! In this log I cover the Pre-Release of kinky studio 0.1.7.
For this update, I've added two new collars! My current focus is creating the foundation of the project, and collars are essential. I want to be able to leash characters to move them around, as well as link collars and knee cuffs for forced bent-over walks! So this was a necessary step!
Along the way, it was so nice to do some modeling in Blender (it's been a couple of years since I last did 3D modeling). I really enjoyed it, so I made a second posture collar as well!
The nice thing is I'm way less rusty in Blender now, and I'm ready to create more gear myself for future updates! Up until now, in order to start fast and get results quickly, I worked a lot with premade assets. But since there actually aren't that many good kinky 3D objects available, I'll make them myself! The only issue is it's quite time-consuming. Since I don't currently work on this project full-time (sadly), I need to balance my time between content creation and core systems.
One issue I encountered while making the posture collar was fitting it onto the avatar. As my studio name suggests, I like things tight. But in the 3D world, this isn't easily achievable, you often end up with things clipping through each other...
So I had to actually deform the skin under the neck and on the sides so it would behave more like real skin, making the collar feel way better. This is a neat tool that's part of the Unreal Metahuman ecosystem, and it will allow me to be quite precise with gear fitting! It's not perfect but it's making gear adjustement way more flexible! That said with the combination of animation, breathing etc, it's hard to have no overlay at all, but can fixe quit a lot with those tools.
It's probably not as precise as what could be done in a dedicated 3D editor like Blender, and the workflow is a bit tedious because I need to apply the deformer to see and test it. But the nice part is I can stay within the software and it's all integrated, it creates a curve directly that I can animate within my animation core system.
I won't dive too deep into the technical side here. However, I'm all for sharing, and there are really no secrets in what I'm doing! So if there are people out there who want to know more about the tech, feel free to reach out. I'm really open to sharing more in-depth technical details. And if I get many requests, I might do technical posts if there's interest!
Another addition in this version is the gagged voice! The voices are recordings of my love that we made together for the project. I think it's a nice start, but there's still work to do! I think the voices need more diversity of "mmhf" sounds. We did a couple, but some really subtle ones could be nice like almost mute ones. Another thing is linking face movement with sound better. We'll try to record face motion with sound at the same time to have a really tight correlation between motion and sound! That could be really nice, combined with multiple loops.
Also, currently all the avatars share the same voice, which is a bit disturbing because you can recognize the voice very well, and it gives a wrong sense of spatialization. I've already planned more recording sessions, and I have friends who are up for it! Regarding sound in general I've also added better spatialization, which I think is really cool and adds a better sense of position in the space!
Another addition is knee cuffs! Doing leg restraints is trickier than arms because legs need to walk as well! So for it to work, I've animated a knee-bound walk that I blend with everything else. For a first animation, it's not too bad, but I need to create more animation iterations to get better at it.
I've done some animation in the past and took a couple of workshops on it, so it's something I'm familiar with and love doing. But it's also really time-consuming, so it's not my primary focus right now to go too in-depth with details yet.
Another nice addition is the ability to switch avatars now! For the moment it's really rough, I don't like how it looks, but I'll add some VFX for it at a later stage or find a way to have something better than pure cut like it's now. What's nice though is being able to control different avatars and have different interactions with them. Currently, it's not possible to change the avatar in the snapshot position, only the main controlled one.
I've also fixed the main area screenshot! If you didn't know about it, it's a bit hidden if you don't check the controls. Press C to take a screenshot inside the main area. Until now, this had a bug where the main avatar would disappear from the screenshot. Now it's fixed! It allows for some interesting angles for pictures!
I've started adding some finesse to animations by adding a kind of gasping motion when the posture collar has been on for more than a certain time. This is something I'm especially looking forward to in the future: adding time-based conditions to have things happen when different criteria are met. All in the spirit of giving life and more variety to my characters and giving them some sort of expression and personnality.
For now, they're all the same, but once all the basic core systems are in place (which will take me a couple more months!), I'll start producing more animations and content to make them have different trait.
In general, I try to balance my work between core system updates and content. I can easily get lost in perfecting systems or making tons of assets, so I try to stay in between so the project feels like it's moving forward with both content and better mechanics!
I also prefer putting more time between each update. Packaging, uploading, posting, etc. takes time, and I like this slower pace better. I think for people following the project, it's more satisfying to have fewer updates with more content, as it takes time to download several gigabytes, decompress, etc.
Finally, I did some updates to the studio itself. I was getting annoyed having the same avatar everywhere, so now it looks more diverse and feels cooler, I think!
To conclude: This is quite a big update with several new features! The project is still in alpha, so you might encounter some bugs, and I haven't done any optimization passes yet. This means the project currently runs best on high-end hardware. I've tested it on my older computer with a GTX 1080 and encountered some issues, especially with depth of field (DOF) and raytracing, but the rest was working.
The road to release is still long, but I'm having a lot of fun and really enjoying working on this! I hope you'll like it as well!
All images and videos in this post were captured directly from the game itself.
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