I am pretty adept in character design and animation, but I am completely new to level design in Unity - and level design in general - so I’m wondering about a couple things.
My past experience has been mostly with the terrain editor up until now, but now I want to work on some indoor areas.
Knowing Unity has a powerful editor, I’m wondering how much of the process is best done in Unity itself? Would it be best to do what I can in Unity and use 3d apps when needed? Or would it be better to mostly work in my 3d app?
Next question, which ties in with my last a bit, is about tiling. Never having designed levels I do not have much experience with tiling textures. I have a free program that generates textures for me, but I’m not sure the best method to get them working properly. Would that be best left handled by Unity when neccessary? Or would I be better off tiling them in a 3d application?
Final question - In many games with tiling textures I see certain effects that seem to be applied on top of the premade tiling textures. An example of what I am trying to explain is lets say you have a brick texture your using for an entire building. But in key locations - such as in an alley - you see things such as dirt marks, graffiti, etc applied on top of the tiling texture. How would one go about doing this type of thing?
This depends on the complexity of the scene I guess… it’s generally a good idea to flesh out the main interior sections inside your 3d app and import into unity. This allows additional elements i.e crates and barrels to be imported into your scene and placed inside unity. Depending on the type of level I would also suggest taking a “modular” approach, where you create generic rooms and corridors to a fixed scale (working to a scale of meters would be a worth while approach) that way you can fit the modular blocks together in order to create your levels.
Texture tiling is best to get sorted inside your 2d app, if you do a google search for “Offset tiling tutorial” for photoshop you should find a fair amount of guides on how tileable textures can be created inside photoshop… the key thing you need to get done inside your 3d app is getting the UV mapping setup correctly before exporting to unity.
The common term for these elements is “Decals” these can be added to your scene inside unity by applying transparent textures to a plane and adding them to your level. I would suggest creating these inside your 3d app also and building a library of elements that you can then drop into unity and drag into your scene as and when you need them.