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:
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.