For many years everyone has wanted a better pipeline for building assets, levels and environments for the Source Engine. Accomplishing this has been my passion for several years. It’s now finally in a mature state, and I wanted to share news on TA about it again (last time I posted about Wall Worm here was back in 2011).
You can now ditch Hammer. 3ds Max can now be your entire level editor for Source. Here’s the new WIP guide on this subject: Hammered to the Max: A Hammer User’s Guide to 3ds Max.
That book is still a WIP and does not have a lot of art assets yet, but has much information on this.
There are VMF/MAP importers that were commissioned by Rob Briscoe from Dear Esther. There is a VMF Exporter. You can build all your scene materials inside Max. Build models in place and populate the scene with proxies that export as props. Automatically PAK your assets when exporting. Generate RAD files, RES files, Soundscapes from the scenes themselves. 2D Sky render/exporter… innovative 3D skybox methods… Do all your world geometry and entities in Max.
If you are a level designer and are sick of Hammer, or if you are on a team that utilizes Max already in some aspect of your pipeline, you may consider learning how to use Wall Worm as your entire Source Engine pipeline.
Most of Wall Worm is the free pipeline tools. But I have also built some commercial addons that enhance Wall Worm:
CorVex Level Design Plugin for quick, parametric layout and walls.
Here is an example of CorVex being utilized to quickly set the backbone of a landscape terrain where displacements are used:
For the Hammer user, I’ve added versions of Carve and Make Hollow in the Wall Worm Carver tool.
I am also available for hire to provide remote education via Skype or Google Hangouts and to build custom tools.