Is it possible to use Maya for level design, and if so, how?

[xycos]

If not, what should I use for level design?

I've been exporting entire meshs with reversed normals for an interior area, and though I guess this works fine, I'm almost certain that with large levels walking around a large set of unique meshs would _not_ be an ideal solution, especially with repetitive structures for things in the environment (for example, in my hotel level, I have a lot of plants, and placing multiple copies of identical plants doesn't seem right).

I've gotten partially around this by deleting some objects from my mesh and making them seperate meshs, then having the game place them in based on coordinates, using an XML file. While this works great, I'd prefer a visual way to place them.

[AndyCR]

im planning on making a simple "level editor" for my project using irrlicht. it would simply allow you to import meshes, position them, and so on. you would have one plant mesh as one file, one room mesh as one file, etc. and then join them together in the level editor, have that export a file which your game can interpret to place the models correctly.

thats my take on the problem anyway...

EDIT: didnt read the last part of your post, heh. i would do what you said with the xml file, but simply write a little program to visually place the models and write the xml file.

[pfo]

While this works great, I'd prefer a visual way to place them.

It does help, I'm using Newton and I've got drag and drop selection available for 3d objects (they show you how to do it in the SDK). I position them in my world then save them to xml and load them up again later, takes a lot of the overhead out of positioning things and designing worlds. You might be able to implement something similar in Irrlicht using its collision detection.

Before this solution, I could place things with dialogs, but that was too cumbersome after a while.

[MrPotatoes]

learn mel scripting so that you can import maya files.

[xycos]

I have a general idea of mel scripting; how would yo import a script into Irrlicht? Is there a MEL script processor, and, if so, was it ported to the .NET implementation?

[Guest]

bump?

[xycos]

Oops, I figured it out elsewhere on the forum. Sorry, sorry, sorry -____-!