Creating Marathon Levels using Sketchup
Introduction
This
is a tutorial on creating scenarios for the Aleph One using the free Google Sketchup 3D modelling application together with my
MarathUp plug-in suite.
MarathUp
is a collection of Ruby scripts for Sketchup that allow you to build a
Marathon level as a 3D model, using the powerful 3D editing
facilities provided by Sketchup, and export it in the form of a Map
file that can be loaded and played by Aleph One.
This tutorial does not assume
any prior knowledge of Sketchup, but it will only teach you enough to
get through the examples here. If you haven't used Sketchup before,
working through its on-line tutorials and help files is strongly
recommended. Even though Sketchup is much easier to use than most other 3D
modelling applications, you probably won't be able to pick
it up and use it right away without some guidance.Getting Started
Installing Sketchup
MarathUp requires Sketchup 6 or later. Free binaries for MacOSX and Windows are available from the Sketchup web site.
Installing MarathUp
The contents of the RubyScripts
folder in the MarathUp distribution must be placed in Sketchup's plug-ins folder. On MacOSX
this is /Library/Application Support/Google Sketchup 6/Sketchup/Plugins. On Windows (if you've installed Sketchup in the default location) it's C:\Program Files\Google\Google SketchUp 6\Plugins.
If
you've installed an earlier version of MarathUp, remove all the
previous Marathon-related scripts from the Plugins folder first,
otherwise they might conflict with the new ones.
Copy the contents of the RubyScripts folder (not the folder itself) into Sketchup's Plugins
folder. If you've done this correctly, next time you launch Sketchup
there should be a new sub-menu under the Plugins menu called Marathon containing the
following commands:
- Wall Properties
- Floor/Ceiling Properties
- Polygon Properties
- Platform Properties
- Object Properties
- Level Properties
- Monster Placement
- Item Placement
- Orient Textures
- Show Coordinates
- Import Textures
- Import Monsters
- Import Items
- Import Scenery
- Export Map
If
these commands don't all appear, you've probably put the scripts in the
wrong place. There's also a chance that they're in the right place but
something went wrong when loading them -- see Troubleshooting for ways of sorting out problems like that.
Other Tools
Although
it's not needed for this tutorial, if you want to go further you'll
probably want to get hold of ShapeFusion for extracting textures out of
the Shapes file in a format suitable for use by MarathUp.
Moving On
Once you have the necessary tools installed, you can start using MarathUp.
If you want to try creating a level yourself, carry on to Exercise 1.
If you just want to see a demonstration of the final result, a Sketchup file Example1.skp is included which contains the end product of this tutorial. You can load it into Sketchup and follow the directions here to export and play it.