Best way to design levels

I have been playing around with WED and I must say, I can't see myself creating good looking levels with it.
However, I have seen 3dgs project with rather professional looking 3d-enviorments.
Which is way I am wondering, how did they do that?

Maybe design a level in blender and import it?

You must see WED as a tool to fit things together / place things. Besides that, a level build out of blocks is very slow and no fun to build as u can imagine.

Building all in your 3d model tool is one way. Or u buy your assets like i do cause iam no model designer. Because of that i cant advice good Software for building Levels, but iam also interested in.

Always use LOD. There many more things to keep an eye on, but i must sleep for now

till then

You remind me of an old wise man with a long white beard, sitting on an mountain, about to tell you the deepest secrets of the world... falling asleep before he can finish 😂

The WED level design philosophy is based on the level editors that are used to create levels for old games like Quake, Unreal or Half-Life.

If you invest a lot of time into making levels just with blocks you can still create something nice looking. For example, the youtube channel Custom Gamer reviewed many nice looking Quake maps and talks about the level design in detail for each one. Very informative.

Here is one video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qfwblog7iQs

But of course, it still looks dated for modern games. So the best way would be, just like you already said, to create levels in other 3d applications like Blender and import them piece by piece into WED. Depending on your skills in modeling and texturing you can create really beautiful levels this way, no doubt about that.