Autodesk Viz is pretty much designed for exactly that purpose, but realistically all of the apps you listed plus more will work just fine. Just use whatever you're comfortable with. I'd use Maya, personally, because it is what I'm more familiar with, but Blender or even Wings are perfectly suitable for such a purpose.

I like DeleD, because it's small, fast, and has the tools you need. You can build various dungeon parts (tunnel sections, grates, etc) as prefabs, and then populate the actual dungeon level with these prefabs, adding custom designs where desired.

However, the important part is that you choose a tool that suits your working style, and a tool that can actually export to the runtime engine you will use.

Using the Personal Learning Edition of Maya comes with a number of limitations, the biggest being that it is for personal use only, not for commercial usage. If you're making money or gaining any sort of beneficial business due to any product generated with it, then you're producing commercial work.

I'd recommend playing around with Maya PLE to become familiar with it, but I would not use it for any sort of distributed content, just to be on the safe side. Unreal and Half-life have exporters that allow you to create content to be dumped into mods from the PLE, so there is obviously some leway in your ability to distribute your content. Again, do you plan on making any money whatsoever with this game?

If you're really wanting to learn Maya, then go for it. If you're wanting to learn something that you can use in the future commercially and not have to pay a few grand for, I'd recommend going for Blender, Wings3D, or DeleD. Maya is a bit overkill if you're just wanting to do some basic modeling.

Maya is not only a huge amount of overkill, but its going to make your task considerably more difficult.

My suggestion would be to use Wings3d or Silo for the actuall modeling (since poly modeling is not only simplified, but easier and faster in these programs than it would ever be in maya). When you are done you can texture in wings and export to blender (because blender can export to just about whatever you need to), or if you go with silo you can export to blender, texture and then export to your desired format.

Dont go the route of maya, not for games and especially not at your level.

Good luck.

Quote:Original post by slowpid
Maya is not only a huge amount of overkill, but its going to make your task considerably more difficult.

...

Dont go the route of maya, not for games and especially not at your level.

The Doom3 development team used Maya as their level editor...

Tho yes, its not the best beginners tool