Let me introduce you to the latest product in the RealRestraint line : the Deluxe Gag & Blindfold. This is another restraint I've been wanting to make for years because I love this design, and that needed mesh and materials to look good enough, so here it is finally !
This is the classic harness gag that you see everywhere in BDSM scenes : a V-shaped strap over the face, a Y-shaped strap on the head, and horizontal straps around the jaw and behind the neck. Its purpose is to hold a gag as tightly as possible, tighter than the regular ring, ball and panel gags that sport only one strap, without much chance of escape. Tight, secure, and sexy !
It's also a 3-in-1 gag : it is a ring gag, a ball gag, and a panel gag, all in one object. The ring can be converted to a bit (for ponygirls and boys), and the ball can be converted to a ball/bit combination. And it is not just for show, you won't "speak" the same way if you are gagged with a ring than if you are gagged with a ball, and yet differently if your mouth is covered.
More so, although the "Simple ring" and "Simple ball" will make you speak exactly like the RealRestraint Ring Gag and Ball Gag respectively, being gagged in "Harness ring" and "Harness ball" will garble you even more. Yes, they're tighter than the "Tight" level of the other RealRestraint gags, without being totally silent (you have to choose one of the "Total" locks for that, no surprise there).
And it comes with the assorted blindfold, that uses the latest RLV 2.9 camera features, to complete the package :
With these RLV 2.9 camera features, you can see yourself and what's very close to you, and that's it. The range of your vision depends on how tight the blindfold is locked :
Materials
The textures of this head harness are made with materials, i.e. the leather actually shines dynamically !
This means that you need a materials-capable viewer with "Advanced Lighting Model" activated in the Graphics Preferences. You can do this at next to no cost for your graphics card, even if it is not too powerful, by turning the shadows off in the drop-down list below :
Textures
The leather textures are the same as the ones used in the Leather Body Harness I released a few months ago. Therefore, your Deluxe Gag and your Body Harness are perfectly assorted.
And like the Body Harness, this harness gag & blindfold combo is entirely customizable :
To customize the gag (or the blindfold), click on it, go to "Plugins", then "HeadHarnessTex" :
The menu itself is rather simple. On the left side you have the parts of the harness you want to select and the textures and colors you want to apply to them, and on the right side you can choose a preset that will change the colors and patterns automatically, and to either apply the change to the object you have clicked on (gag or blindfold), or to apply those changes to the other object as well so you don't have to do this twice.
The "Sections" button allows you to select sections of the harness individually (a section is a strap, the rings and other metal parts associated to it), or groups of sections such as only the vertical straps or only the horizontal straps, or only a restraint part (ball, bit, ring...), or even the harness entirely :
The "Surfaces" button allows you to select some parts of the sections you've chosen, such as either the front of the straps, or the trim (the side of the strap), or the fasteners or the rings, or even a group of those surfaces, such as the whole strap, or all the metal stuff, or even the whole section (you don't usually want to select the whole section but only either the whole strap or the whole metal, but why not) :
Of course you can color the straps the way you like thanks to the "Tint" page :
And if you can't find the color that you want, you may just specify it yourself with the "CUSTOM" button. Simply write the color in RGB format (either from 0.0 to 1.0 for all three colors, or from 0 to 255 like in the SL color editor), then click on "Submit". For example, if you want a teal tint on the vertical straps only, select "Verticals" in "Sections", then "CUSTOM" in tint and enter "64 128 128", like this :
You can change the textures on the "Pattern" page, giving you access to many patterns and writings :
Some of these patterns come in two versions : white on black (written "W&B") and black on white (written "B&W"). Be aware, though, that tinting the straps will tint the patterns as well, in other words it will add some color to the whole texture. It does not cause any issue with black (tinting black will still give you black) nor with white (tinting white will give you your tint exactly), but tinting a different color is problematic because they mix : if you tint a red texture with a blue tint, you end up with some violet.
That's why most of the provided patterns are either black, white, or both, and you can't have two colors on any face unless one of them is black. If you want more than black plus a tint, you need to make the texture yourself and tint it white.
And if you don't really want to bother with precise tinkering, you can always apply a full preset, such as totally black, or black with a red trim, or all yellow, etc, by going to the "PRESETS" page :
If you have some basic knowledge on how to make and import textures into SL, and if you are interested in making your own patterns, read on. Otherwise, jump to the next section.
You've seen several examples of customization above, but you can also create your own textures if you like. The textures contained inside the gag and blindfold are full-perms so they can serve as examples for your own, but you are also provided two base leather textures (black and white) and the UV map of the straps :
This texture is a sort of template that indicates how the whole image is "wrapped" around the strap, like paper wrapped around a gift.
As you can see, the UV map is simple... just write or draw what you want in the middle of the texture, between the two horizontal lines. The two orange strips above and below it represent the trim.
There is a thing to know, though. You might have noticed that the horizontal and vertical straps may or may not share the same pattern (that depends on the pattern). For example, the pattern "You command W&B" will display "YOU COMMAND" on the horizontal straps and "I OBEY" on the vertical ones :
This is because the pattern "You command W&B" is in fact composed of two textures : "You command W&B" and "You command W&B V".
Notice the letters are rotated 90° to the right on the second texture. This is what you will have to do too if you want your textures to be different when the straps are horizontal or vertical : simply name them exactly the same, but add a space and a capital "V" at the end of the vertical one. Also make sure the name does not go beyond 23 characters, which is the limit for a button on the menu.
Some patterns do not have a "V" texture but a "W" one (but they can have both), this is the case for the Seam textures (W&B and B&W). The "W" means "apply this on the blindfold and panel prims". In the case of the "Seams" textures, it will simply not display any seam on the blindfold and panel, because it would look bad.
Once your textures are done, drop them inside the gag and the blindfold (yes, both of them). No need to reset, they will reset themselves and rebuild their lists right away. Be advised that the textures need to be full-perms as well, or they won't be used by the two HeadHarnessTex plugins.
End of the technical part
Style
To hide some of the straps and show others, you use the "Style" plugin, just like in the RealRestraint Siren ropes and Pretty Mummy sets. This gives you the ability to transform your Deluxe Gag into a classic gag, or into something between a classic gag and a head harness :
The "Style" plugin is simpler than the "HeadHarnessTex" plugin, because it has only one page, that shows the styles that are available for the current lock. For example, in the "Simple ring" lock, the "Style" plugin gives you the ability to hide and show the chin strap, and to replace the ring with a bit (which garbles your speech pretty much the same).
Likewise, when selecting the "Lock" lock (which doesn't garbles your speech and doesn't force your mouth open), the "Style" plugin allows you to make your Deluxe Gag look like a harness, or a half harness, or be totally invisible.
Adjusting
Both the gag and the blindfold are made of unrigged, modifiable mesh, which means you can resize every strap individually. The harness is cut into a few parts to make it easy to fit it to your head and face with minimal effort. However, the panel variant features a fitted mesh strap around the neck (it is necessary because it is so low on the neck that when you turn your head, it needs to stretch). Fitted mesh means that you can't move or resize this particular strap, but it's okay. The only thing that makes your neck bigger is the size of your head anyway, and this is precisely what the neck strap is rigged to. In other words and without being too technical, it will always fit you, regardless of the size and the shape of your head.
It is easy adjust your Deluxe Gag. All you have to do is lock it into the configuration that you want (I recommend "Harness ring", "Harness ball" and "Harness panel" because they show all the prims), edit it by right-clicking on it and choosing "Edit", like this :
Then check the "Edit Linked Parts" checkbox on the Edit window, like this :
Then click on all the individual parts to resize them all one by one. There are not many of them, in fact. You have the V-shaped front strap, the V-shaped front panel strap, the panel itself, the Y-shaped top strap and the jaw strap. Plus the restraint parts such as the ball, the ring and the bit, as well as their respective straps if any (the ball and the ring both have their own dedicated straps, the bit does not).
There is an invisiprim in front of the panel part that is meant to hide your lips (they poke through the panel otherwise). I know that most viewers, like Firestorm for example, cannot render invisiprims in Advanced Lighting Model. The reason behind this choice is beyond me, since they do render invisiprims when ALM is off, but they don't when ALM is on. Go figure. They should either render in all cases or not render at all. But the RLV and a few other viewers like Cool VL and Dolphin DO render invisiprims and this is what permits the Deluxe Gag to hide your lips when "Harness panel" is chosen, and to let them show otherwise. However, if your viewer cannot render invisiprims, you still have the option of wearing an alpha layer that is included in the box, it is named "Deluxe Gag panel hide lips". So to recap : if your viewer can render invisiprims, you don't need the alpha layer, but if it cannot, then you do need it.
Lastly, there is some clutter near the mouth : the invisiprim, the ball, the three lips straps, the bit, the panel... They can get in the way when you want to adjust what's close to the mouth. It might be interesting to move them away temporarily when you need to select something underneath. To do this, simply move a prim (say, the invisiprim) to the front until you have access to the ball (for example), work on the ball, adjust it the way you like, then click on the invisiprim again and press Ctrl-Z to undo the latest modification you made on it, i.e. the translation. And voilà, the invisiprim will be back to where it was, without you needing to move it a second time.
So there's a bit of work to resize the gag but it's worth it. If you want, Alexis Sinclair has released a video showing how to resize your gag in 15 minutes (the video takes 5 minutes because it is sped up 3x), the big parts first then the smaller ones.
You can find the RealRestraint Deluxe Gag & Blindfold in any of the RealRestraint vendors in-world, it is Modify, No-copy and Transfer, and costs L$450 :
Have fun !
Marine
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