Sometime ago Muvizu introduced a unsupported feature; ASE file imports. The feature immediately expanded the possibilities of the software by allowing users to import object (static meshes only) into the application to customise their scenes and animations. In the course of testing this feature I found an ASE exporter for Google Sketchup to the Unreal 3 engine. The original file was called hskp2unr.rb and supports a number of import and export formats - which arn't needed for Muvizu. This was made by a chap called HardPCM, who seems to have disappeared, although his twitter account is still there https://twitter.com/#!/HardPCM

The exporter that he made was extremely useful and stable and made the whole of the Google 3D Warehouse available to anyone with Muvizu, Sketchup and the ASE exporter. The only downside to it was that it would only export the geometry of an object and not the collision mesh and left you editing the ASE file manually to either paste in a generic collision model to use or merge in the exact collision you wanted for your object.

So it go me thinking - why not just update it to allow the collision to be exported as well as the geometry? Well that's what I did. Back in 2010 I updated the code to make a Muvizu ASE Exporter plugin for Muvizu and after testing it for about a year it's now been published for anyone to use.

Download here

The plugin itself is licensed under GNU Lesser General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

All credit goes to HardPCM for the original code.

How do I use it?

Well, just download it from the link above and then copy and past the .rb file in to your Google Sketchup\Plugins folder and start Google Sketchup. Once you have your object ready for export, make it into a component and then either copy and paste the component (making it unique and removing all textures) or build a new object that will be the collision mesh. You probably want to rename your collision object component to include collision in the name as it'll be easier to identify which is which.

Once your ready to export the object, just go to the Plugins drop down menu, and select the export option under the Muvizu ASE export option. Then all you need to do is give your model a file name and select which component is the geometry and which is the collision. It's that simple. I've added an option to export without geometry as well. This lets you use the default collision mesh generated by Muvizu.

Any questions, problems or update suggestions just let me know.

Muvizu ASE Exporter.rb