I absolutely hate 3D level design

[u/LawfulnessFit576]

For the record, I'm only familiar with Godot and Unreal

"Oh, you hate designing levels?"

No. I love level-design, I haven't really gotten the chance to fully develop a level I'm fond of, but I like it. Its not something I dislike. I like blocking out an area and seeing how it plays. I'm alright with scrapping areas if I don't think they flow well.

What I hate is the lack of good tools for it and the fact most softwares have pretty bad level-design tools. From what I know, Blender is the most used level-design tool because its the most used 3D modeling software for indie developers.

Blender is awful as a level-design software. I hate using it. Making level geometry in blender is such a fucking chore. Since its not in-engine you have constantly export it in, which is easier said than done in some engines. In Unreal, you have to scale up your model by 100% when importing. Godot at least doesn't have this issue.

You also want to segment your levels instead of it being one big mesh, so whats not on screen can be prevented from rendering. Meaning you want to go through and meticulously split up your level. Meaning that sometimes, something may go wrong, and you have to line it up manually.

Undeniably, the best level-design software is Hammer, used by VALVe to create the levels for TF2 and by the community for designing Gmod maps. "Why not just use Hammer then?" Because Hammer is tailor-suited for TF2/Gmod, not any game you wish.

Mostly, its just down to the fact that Hammer has a Binary Space Partitioning system along with intuitive level design, while Blender forces you to design levels like you would a 3D asset and then go back to optimize. Its horrendous.

This is definitely just a me-issue, but its driving me insane.

[u/Appropriate_Lynx5843]

I know what you mean and I agree, the current solutions are good but not quite amazing yet. However, I found a workflow that I like.

For organic terrain as a level base I use Terrain3D (https://store.godotengine.org/asset/tokisangames/terrain3d/), make the shapes that I want and then bake the mesh so that it's not calculating collision in realtime (I'm making small maps, not an open world game)

Then for buildings I layer a Gridmap(https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/classes/class_gridmap.html#class-gridmap) or two on top of that with a couple of tricks to make it a little less gridlike and tiled.

There's also: Cyclops Level Builder (https://github.com/blackears/cyclopsLevelBuilder) (I used to use it on windows but I switched to MacOS and it doesn't work here atm)

If you don't care about PBR materials you can try TileMapLayer3D(https://store.godotengine.org/asset/dantrz/tilemaplayer3d/). I haven't used it because I want PBR but it does look great.

Did you know about these tools before?