This question is intended for someone who is in game development, possibly working in one of the major sweatshops .. 🙂
I’m a programmer, not an artist. Up until recently, I had this notion that level design was something to be done in Maya, by an artist. The programmer would then load it up and “parse” that model and construct a BSP or something.
The more I work with level editors though, the more unrealistic this whole idea of level building in Maya or 3DSMax really seems. Parsing a huge world would be an enormous job, and it just seems so silly to export SO MUCH DATA from Maya only to be converted to the games own format.
So the question is, does anyone use Maya or 3dsmax or milkshape for level design at all, ever? Or is like the first thing a game should create is a map editor?
Building game levels with a 3D-modeller is a viable option for many games (rumor: the God of War team does this). This solution is appropriate for contained levels that have highly detailed and variable environments. I’m sure artists appreciate using the familiar and refined tools of their craft to make levels beautiful. However, this isn’t a viable solution for most open-world games, where a great deal of optimization work goes into streaming the minimally necessary details into memory. A modeller won’t do this, so loading and exporting such a level would make it crawl. In these games, the standard approach is to use the modeller to build reusable level chunks, and compose the rest with a custom level editor. Either way, you will need to parse a 3D-modeling format, and yes, it will be a lot of work.
I’m no guru, but I worked two years on a huge, recently shipped game, for which I wrote quite a bit of the art pipeline 🙂