Odds and Ends

This section covers a few miscellaneous things that haven't been mentioned yet.

Editing multiple objects

You can select multiple faces or objects and edit their properties together. Fields which don't have the same value in all the selected items display as "-" (a hyphen), or in the case of check boxes, with a selected radio button beside the check box. If you enter a value for a mixed-value field, that value will be applied to all items in the selection. However, before closing the property window, you can restore the mixed-value state by re-entering a hyphen or clicking the radio button, and the values for that field will not be changed.

The figure below shows three examples of mixed-value fields -- Light Source, Control Panel and Initially On,

Orienting floor and ceiling textures

MarathUp defaults to exporting floor and ceiling textures so that they automatically tile seamlessly across adjacent polygons. Most of the time this is what's wanted, but if you need to align a floor or ceiling texture a particular way, you can do so using the following steps.
  1. Orient the texture

    When you place a texture on a floor or ceiling, Sketchup unfortunately defaults to orienting it 90 degrees to the way Aleph One will display it at play time. You will need to re-orient it using the Plugins>Marathon>Orient Textures command.
  2. Position the texture

    Use Texture>Position from the contextual menu and drag the texture into the position you want.
  3. Tell MarathUp to use the texture position you've set

    Choose Plugins>Marathon>Floor/Ceiling Properties and check "Use Sketchup texture alignment".

Note that there's no way of making Aleph One rotate a floor or ceiling texture, so you're stuck with the orientation that the Orient Textures command gives you.

Texturing the front faces of walls

In some rare situations, you may need to put a texture on the front face of a wall, instead of the back as is usually done. The Orient Textures command can also be used on a wall face to make the texture appear the right way around for the side it's on.

Diagnosing misaligned geometry

Sometimes you will get a complaint that a floor face can't be found corresponding to a ceiling, or some other geometry problem, and it's very hard to see what's causing it.

You can get some information that may help by selecting the faces and/or edges concerned and using Plugins>Marathon>Show Coordinates. This will display the coordinates of all the vertices in the selected objects, in 1/1024ths of a world unit.

If you select a floor and a ceiling that are supposed to correspond, for example, you can then compare the two lists of coordinates. If the coordinates displayed for two vertices differ by more than 0.5 on any axis, MarathUp won't consider them to match. Note that the two lists may not be in the same order, but each vertex from one list should match up with something from the other one.

There should also be the same number of vertices in each list, and this should correspond to your idea of how many vertices the faces have. If not, you have some extra edges somewhere -- something that you think is a single edge is actually two or more edges. Usually you can find these by going around the face and selecting each edge in turn.

A very short edge may be difficult to find this way, so another approach is to select edges one at a time and use Show Coordinates on them until you find one with an endpoint that doesn't match a vertex in the other face.

Once you've found the offending edges, you may be able to fix the problem by moving things around, or you may need to delete the edges and their attached faces and re-draw them.

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