Ok, so I've been struggling to understand how map creation works in Beamng. I am used to softimage, 3ds, unity and UDK. Unfortunately, none of them are (can be?) used in Beamng, I never worked on blender or torque 3d. I know there are really good tutorials but I dont really want to learn completely new programs when I could make the entire level much faster on the programs I know already. Can anyone save me hours of research and give me a quick summary about what is what, I know blender would be the modeling tool, and torque 3d the level editor ? Can I simply make objects, if not the entire terrain straight on softimage and export the whole thing to beamng then enjoy my map ? Or I REALLY need to learn blender and torque 3d ? I am not talking about vehicules, I know vehicules have their own nomenclature so they work with the physics and doesn't feel like your driving a stone. Finally, where would be the directory of the game objects ? and where is there some game objects in the vehicule selection ? There is absolutely no import... in the ingame editor, is the game editor a ingame version of torque 3d or something ?
I'm not familiar with most of the programs you mentioned, so I don't know how compatible they are. 3ds Max is fine for meshes, no need to use Blender. Other modeling programs should work too, as long as you can get the meshes into DAE format. If you can export a heightmap (16 bit PNG or any format you can convert to PNG) and blendmaps from the terrain editors, you could import them to Torque to get the base terrain. Everything else would have to be placed in the Torque editor, I think. If you press F11 in game, you get the Torque level editor. Just play with it, it's not that hard to learn. Some things may not be intuitive, but mostly it's easy to use.
I spent a lot of time... I mean a LOT of time, creating Half Life and TF1 & 2 maps. In some ways, Torque is actually easier to use than those editors were. The major difference seems to be that you need a 3rd party program or 2 to create objects and such that can be imported as a DAE file. It took me all of... I guess 2 hours to learn the basics of navigating through the editor. It's really not that hard, especially if you follow along with some of the tutorials at first. F11 to enter the editor, J to disable physics (keep things from falling/rolling) and set the Camera to Free Camera (human silhouette button). Right click to spin the camera, WASD to move back and forth. The rest you just kind of play around with until you get the hang of it.