FINALLY… beautiful sculpted skates for SL!

I’ve been looking for nice-looking roller skates in SL for a long time, like really nicely textured and sculpted ones, and I’ve even sent notecards to a couple of shoe designers who weren’t interested in making any ;__;  I know I’ve asked pestered Gogo several times over the past year or so if she knows of any nice roller skates, but the conversation would always end the same way:  we’d both agree that no one had yet made any traditional roller skates that were also good-looking sculpts.

Almost a week ago, however, Gogo IM’d me to ask if I’d seen the new skates ad from Pixel Mode. She passed me a copy of the ad and then I pretty much just said something stupid like AHHHH  YAYYY back to her. Here’s why:

Seriously, how can you look at that and not think, MUST HAVE!? 😀 So, I ran over to Pixel Mode, stared at the vendor in admiration for a while (Tya Fallingbridge made this cool discotheque-ish set-up for it) and then paid my L$450 for the most beautiful sculpted roller skates I’ve seen yet in SL.

The shape of the boots, wheels, toe stops, and laces are really nicely done. The tongue part of the boots kind of extend upward and the laces are left undone. When you click the skates, a blue dropdown menu lets you change the colors of the sheels, toe stopper, and laces.

As the ad states, your purchase includes two pairs of skates; one white and one black. For each pair, there are actually three skates included: one for your left foot, and two for your right foot. One of the right-footed shoes is scripted with a skating animation, while the other one isn’t scripted at all so that you can use another AO with your skates.

You are definitely going to want to use a different skating animation HUD, or AO, or whatever, because the one simple skating animation included isn’t that great; I wasn’t thrilled with the way it made my arm completely cut into my av’s torso:

The skates are No Modify, which means you cannot drop a different skating animation into the shoe.  This being the case, you pretty much have to use a separate HUD/AO.  I did a bit of shopping around to see what other skating HUD and AO choices are out there; the only one I could find was the L$650 rollerblade AO sold at Sine Wave. You can call me cheap if you like, but I’d already spent L$450 on the skates and didn’t feel like dropping another L$650 to have a decent skating animation.

So, what to do?  Well, I’ve had Skoopf skates since 2007, though. (Heck, who doesn’t have Skoopf skates?!) It’s easy enough to use the script and animations from your Skoopfs to create your own makeshift skating HUD to go with your Pixel Mode Roxy Rollers.  If you’re not familiar with how to go about doing this, here are some quick and super-easy steps, complete with pictures 🙂  This will take maybe two minutes to do, and your result will be like this:

Click on the images to see bigger versions of them on my flickr stream.

1.  Drag your right-side Skoopf skate from your inventory, to the ground.  You want the right side because this is the one that carries all the scripts and animations.  Right-click the skate and select Open from the wheel menu, and select Copy To Inventory.

2.  You should now have a folder in your inventory called Skoopf Ultra Roller Skates (Right), or something like that.  You can go ahead and delete that right-footed Skoopf skate you had rezzed earlier, and don’t worry about losing it because it should be a copyable object.

3.  Now rez a cube prim, and rename it to whatever you want your HUD to be called; I chose to name mine Melanie’s Skate HUD and textured it with one of my favorite pics.  Drag all of the items from that Skoopf Ultra Roller Skates (Right) folder into the Contents tab of your cube prim.  Be sure to double check and make sure all of the scripts, animations, and notecard have made it into the cube.

4.  Right-click > Take the cube you’ve created.  It will now appear in your inventory, in your Objects folder.  Go ahead and move your HUD into the same folder as your Roxy skates to make it easier to find later.  Now right-click the HUD object in your inventory, select Attach To HUD from the contextual menu that appears, and then select Top Left to attach the HUD to the upper left corner of your client.  (Or you can attach it elsewhere, whatever your preference is.)

5.  Your client screen should now look something like this:

6.  You can reposition and resize the HUD to better fit into that spot by right-clicking the HUD and then using the prim-editing interface.  After moving and resizing my HUD, this is what it looks like on my client:

Now you’re all set!  And since your HUD is made of a single cube prim, you can make it as tiny and unobtrusive as you want (I personally hate having a lot of HUDs cluttering up my view).  Click your HUD once and the blue dropdown should appear that will let you turn it on, and now you’ve got all those Skoopf skating tricks ready to be used.

If you don’t own any Skoopf skates and would like to use the scripts and anims for your Roxy Roller skates, you can pick up a pair at the little vendor in front of Caroline’s Jewelry, which is right across the way from my store.  If I recall correctly, they’re L$75.

There is a completely free alternative, too.  TP in to Abranimations, and you should see a freebie board near the landing point.  One of the freebie items is a pair of roller skates. These Abranimations freebie skates work in such a way that you must use the included HUD in conjunction with the skates, though, so you will need to attach two objects instead of just one. Overall, I personally prefer the Skoopf script/anims. ^_^

Now all we need is for Pixel Mode to make some nice, traditional-looking ice skates for us… 😀

Other credits…
Hair – Truth Linda
Tank top – Mon Amie group gift
Shorts – Maitreya (older item, might not be available anymore)
Socks – Lulu
Sculpted Noobs – Art Laxness Noob Pack (zombie noob is a mod made by a friend)