I know its a bit of a broad question, but I’m having difficulty finding tutorials or information on level design.
I can model some basic stuff in Blender. I’m attempting to model a level, but unsure of how to.
Is it best to create walls, floors, ceiling, doors and windows as separate objects, and snap them together in Unity, or create rooms as one, and snap those together in Unity?
And then have a collection of rooms, and have an exterior wall around them, so it would be like realistically walking in, and around a building?
If you’re doing a large level, or a lot of levels with similar style, a modular approach like this would save a lot of time. For a smaller level it might just be quicker to model it all as one blender scene and then import that. Even still, I’d only do the basic level geometry like this, and still keep the smaller “clutter” objects and other re-usable objects separate and place them in unity.
I like to create everything as separate, in this way I will be able to drag and drop walls ,floors, doors etc.
I have order in my assets because, if the project is growing probably I will get in troubles with the number of assets.
I suggest to you practice and practice, practice makes perfect, when I started as blender user, I used to practice many hours per day and when finally I finished a model I thought, hey, I can make this better!!! and I well started again the project.
there is a site where you can find low poly meshes so you can practice if you analyze how the mesh is composed. www.blendswap.com
If you are looking for general information, mapcore and level-design.org might help, I especially liked this article on level-design wiki.
As for details such as whether you should model whole rooms in Blender or assemble them in editor it is entirely up to you and your project. More smaller pieces you have, more flexibility there is but assembly process is lengthy and a bit tedious, managing lots of small objects can become harder as well. Larger chunks of geometry (whole rooms) will be definitely easier to snap and copy around, but you can only get so much variation out of them.
You could also grab games that come with level editors/modding tools and just check out maps so you can see what approach they took with building levels, modularity etc. Also, you might notice that in some games such as Elder scrolls series modules are very carefully designed and snapped together, whereas in others such as unreal tournament you’ll see more freeform modularity where level designers will jam pieces together, stretch, scale, and creatively combine pieces that are not supposed to go together to come up with unique layouts and shapes.
I have seen a tutorial of Sabestian Lague(guess that’s his name).He got lot of tutorials.In character creation he got two of them - a beginner and a intermediate tutorial of character creation which includes modeling,texturing,rigging, walk and run animation and messing the character up in unity…