Bones are weird. I mean I know a bit about bones and weighting from faffing around with Blender in the past, but these bones don't seem to work as I'd expect. For instance

I separated out the two rear-facing arm sockets, and weighted them as I would any other part of the armor. ("Armor" sounds weird in this context. But then so does "garment" and "outfit" is already too overloaded so what to do?) Anyway, I weighted them, then gave them each a custom bone and painted the sockets with their respective bones.

What I've done here is made the cylinders part of the outfit for now. If I can get the weight and position to work here, I can separate them out into their own nif files once I know everything lines up. So I painted the cylinders with the custom bones from their respective nifs and saved. Then I looked  at the generated mesh with nifskope.

So that's the two cylinders at ground level there. Worse is to come.

The damn sockets aren't where I need them to be. Well I fussed at this for a bit and I couldn't get them right. Then it hit me: the sockets are being dragged down because the custom bone is still on the floor. Reason for that is that last time when I entered a height, every thing was off like this and I had to move the bone up to get stuff to line up. So, having no better ideas, I did the same here: Found the left  arm helper bone :

and translated it upwards.

Wonder of wonders, by the time socket is in the right place, as if by magic, so is the cylinder.

So if I had entered 120 as the bone height when I created it, would this have Just Worked(TM)? Or would it have been just the same with the offset fucking up subsequent things? I have no idea. Like I say, these bones are weird.

On the bright side, I shouldn't have to weight anything else to this particular bone, or at least not in combination with this cylinder. So, worst case, I can weight new restraints by setting the bone to zero, adding the model, and cranking the bone back to z120.

Of course, I still have to see how it looks in-game.

Looks good in Bodyslide anyway.

Useful thing to remember if you're going to try this sort of jiggery-pokery:use nifskope to edit the nif in bodyslide's SliderData, and not the nif bodyslide generates when you build the outfit. Otherwise every time you build it, it'll overwrite your careful work.

In game ... mixed results.

The height is right, but there's a horizontal offset. And I'm willing to be it's offset from where it's supposed to be by the same amount as the socket is offset from the center of the model. The trouble is, the socket is not so offset. So if I move the bone I'll move the sockets off true again.

I suppose this is one advantage to having invisible helpers. if I was still weighting to a floating invisible cube, it wouldn't matter where the cube ended up so long as the cylinder looked right.

Luckily I kept a backup of the old nif.

Maybe I should read up on bone weighting in nifskope. It might be easier to fix that way.

On the plus side, those cylinders are rock solid in their vertical offset, and they don't move when the girl's torso twists. That's exactly what I wanted for bars that are supposed to be part of a restraint. It won't work for anything with too much lattitude of movement, but it should see the idea of "pinned to the wall" nicely.

I wonder what it will do if I lie the cross down on the ground. Assuming the animation still works (and I can't see why it shouldn't), will the cylinders rotate with the overall model so they point straight up (or down)? Or will they remain stubbornly horizontal. I'm hoping they take their orientation from the socket object where I created the bone.

I've noticed that they don't drop down when the girl sneaks. Not sure if that's relevant or not.

Looking at nifskope a bit more, there's a node named for the bone, and then there's a set of co-ords for the bone itself. I've been moving the node, but maybe I should have moved the bone. I sort of assumed they were effectively the same thing...

You should definetly take a look at bone weighting in Outfit Studio, it's far easier and less time consuming than any other voodoo stuff in NifSkope.

I've been using Outfit Studio. By and large it works fine, but I can't for the life of me make these add-ons stay where I want them to stay.

Actually, I think I'm going to mount them on the wall instead. There's a trick with a dummy node that Crazy used for his gun animations that's looking promising at the moment. If I can just get the nodes framework to spawn with the same z-coord as the board I'm using as a wall...

There's always something...