Building and Texturing a Level

General Discussion
1

Hi folks. I know that level editors (or the lack thereof) have been covered a lot, but thats not really what I’m after.

I am more interested in what the best tool is to build and texture the actual 3D models that are the level. My game is a sort of 3D take on the old isometric games like The Chaos Engine, so the levels will be nice and blocky. None of this new-fangled uppy and downy terrain nonsense :stuck_out_tongue:

This is an overview of the sort of levels I will be going for (this was just a quick mockup in solidworks, textured in photoworks)

SolidWorks seems like a nice option so far, but I have no idea how to texture the models properly. All I read about is UV mapping, but surely that isn’t the right way to texture a big model with lots of repeating textures?

Blender just feels wrong for levels, or is that just my inexperience talking? I am used to making maps for games like Unreal, Quake and Jedi Knight (the old ones) so those are the sorts of editors that feel natural to me.

2

no UV-map means no texture. (except you use panda’s auto-uv-mode which does that at runtime but technically speaking no exception)

solidworks afaik is used as CAD package mainly for engineering/architectural stuff. less for building games.

if blender feels unnatrual that’s propably cause you worked with a different type of editors befor. it’s perfectly suited to create levels.
but it’s not based on “brushes” such as the old quake-maps, therefore you might feel a bit lost. but since panda is surface-oriented, and not brush(volume) oriented blender fits panda better.

3

Ok, thanks, I guess its just the way that the textures are handled that’s foreign to me. I guess I will have to play with it a bit more.

Solidworks is a CAD package, but it is easy to export the part files to an egg file, which makes it quite good for the sort of levels I am making (but useless for textureing).