Vardo, LiveAboard Version 1.7a

The Vardo – Fully Fitted Live Aboard
in Redwood and Cream

Sorry but I no longer have land to display this. If you are interested, IM me in world and we can rez it in a sandbox. I'll bring cookies.

Carefully crafted, traditional Romani-style Vardo. 100% original mesh and texturing by yours truly. I've deliberately left the texture quite neutral cream so you can retint it to your desired shade if you wish.

This is the Fully Fitted "Live Aboard" version. It includes basic animations in several seating areas, the bed, shower and toilet. The stove cover, tap, shower, toilet seat and stool are all functional (the stool moves out when you sit). You can raise the toilet seat, then sit to use it, take a seated shower, even open and close the screen.

I encourage modifications and if you have questions or need any help, give me a shout.

The Vardo is fully visible from 100m away and can mostly be seen from the other side of a region, even at a viewer LOD setting of only 2 (Firestorm’s default) and has very good physics. All LOD levels have been hand crafted and optimised for good viewing detail versus land impact. Yet it’s still only 55LI in base configuration, 79LI in the fully fitted version.

Talking of configuration: you also get a configuration HUD. You can, at a click, change from slide windows, bay windows or no windows, on each side individually. The rear Bay window is fixed. The parts are automatically unlinked, deleted, rezzed and relinked as required. All you need to do is sit back and watch as your Vardo is rebuilt in front of your eyes. When finished it is back to a single, moveable object again.

I've included the Open Plan Vardo too. With that you have maximum room to place your own furniture and items. All the surfaces are safe to rez on. Set it up as a live-in, a fortune teller’s van, or a fun place to camp out somewhere. The slide windows, double/double doors (I’m sure there’s a name for that style but it escapes me) and top centre windows are all functional at a click. Click the bottom doors to open them all, the top doors to open just those.

It is, of course, mod/copy (except scripts). The textures are UV mapped and AO baked (AO is light shading in corners and dark spots to add realism, it is *not* full baked shadows). All the parts have faces where you would probably expect them though, and the UV mapping is very simple on most parts. I like things to be easy for others (and myself) to retexture and modify so I design it for that. Many faces can easily just have a texture dropped on, with some tweaking of the scale and offset in the edit window. Of course they can be tinted too.

If you want to get more adventurous and make your own full textures, the UV and AO maps are very easy to work with and are available for free download. All are baked at 4096x4096 for high detail workup. Download links provided in the NC with the product (warning: it’s a big collection!)

You can even link your own items to it because my scripts are designed to account for that, but be careful that *your items* are happy to be linked. I suggest you have some experience with editing and linking before you do that, and always take a copy first. Make sure that the floor is always root prim or the physics might get messed up and the HUD will misplace things.

A word on scale: I decided to make the Vardo SL scale. That is, larger than life. The reason is simply that if I made it ‘real’ size, you would hardly be able to move about in it and your camera would constantly by above the roof. That’s no fun. The idea is to be able to use it and this is the only way. It’s not much bigger than RL; these things could be 12 feet high in reality! Even so, the fully fitted version can be a little cramped in places (like the shower). It's the right size, and just big enough, but if you add your own animations they might clip through the screen if the move a lot, for example.

NOTES:
Use the HUD to set your configuration *before* retexturing or resizing the Vardo. If you really want to be able to reconfigure it with *your* retextured parts, there is a way to put them into my EasyLink™ rezzer system. Give me a shout in world if you want to and I’ll tell you how it works.

You MUST accept the 'Create Links' Permission pop-up when you use the HUD, otherwise it will not do anything.

You need to stand close to the Vardo to use the HUD, it's Whisper range. Do not have multiple Vardos in range when you use the HUD or things *will* go wrong. Every effort is made to ensure the HUD always works, but sometimes SL just messes up, especially when rezzing and relinking things. I’ve had no failures, but it can happen so always take a copy of the Vardo before using the HUD. Note that I've marked the item as 100% mesh because all the structural parts are. There are some invisible prims as seating and effects targets; those are better as prims because that lowers LI.