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Level design using 3ds max

Started by November 21, 2011 05:07 PM
-1 comments, last by ill 13 years, 1 month ago
3Ds max has great modeling tools and I use it for my FPS engine. The only problem is texturing the levels once I'm done laying out the geometry takes long and is tedious. I use the UVW Map modifier which is OK most of the time and allows me to fix up texture alignment. This is very tedious and takes a long time though.

I've used other FPS level editors for games like Quake, Halflife, Doom 3. They have tools to help texture map the world much easier. I might write a plugin to help with this if no one else knows of a good one. I can't find one at all on Google search. I mostly just fund tutorials on UVW Unwrap which is completely not what I need for assigning different materials to surfaces and aligning them.

This plugin would basically let me select one or more faces. I would then fix the awful warping of UV coords that 3DS max does on the geometry after editing with the press of a button.
It would do this by tiling the texture on to the face based on world coordinates. If the texture is 512x512 and 512 pixels equals one meter, then a texture would tile twice on a 2x2 square.

After this I would scale and translate the texture around on the face until I'm happy with how it looks. I'd have some shortcut keys for this.

There's probably no way to easily prevent 3DS max from messing up the texture coordinates on geometry afterwards when I modify the geometry some more though unless I write a plugin for that too. By then I might as well make my own level editor so I'm probably not going to do that...

If anyone knows of a similar plugin that'd be awesome. If not, if anyone has some extra suggestions for how to make the plugin better.

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