Anvil Level Design Tool – Trenchbroom for Blender

/ News / / Blender, Design

The Anvil Level Design Tool is a free and open source add-on for Blender heavily inspired by the popular TrenchBroom level editor. This tool adds several features to Blender in two new workspaces – Level Design & Hotspot Mapping, that combined back it easy to rapidly create and texture game levels. Features of the Anvil Level Design tool include:

Material & UV Management

  • Quick Application: Apply materials directly from the file browser to selected faces.
  • Copy & Tiling: Easily copy textures from one face to another, seamlessly tile them around corners, or stretch them to fit specific target faces.
  • Interactive UV Modes: Includes Face Snapping, Grid Snapping, and a live UV Transform Mode with resize handles to manipulate UVs directly in the 3D viewport.
  • Auto-UVing: Automatically handles UVs when extruding faces.
  • UV Lock: Toggleable setting to either warp materials when you adjust a face or keep them visually anchored in world space (e.g., extending a brick wall without stretching the bricks).
  • Material Organization: Automatically prevents material duplication and includes tools to clean up unused materials.
  • Alpha Bleed Fix: A utility that edits source images to fix visible edges on transparent cutout materials (highly useful for .glb exports).

Hotspot Mapping

  • Auto UV Assignment: Automatically applies UV coordinates by matching 3D face shapes to predefined regions (hotspots) on a texture atlas.
  • Image Editor Integration: Tools to define hotspot maps by drawing split lines over your texture atlas.
  • Orientation Constraints: Restrict certain hotspots to specific angles (e.g., ensuring brick textures only apply to “Wall/Upwards” faces and tiles only to “Floor” faces).
  • Combined Faces: Can treat connected, curving sequences of faces as a single rectangle for seamless continuous mapping.
  • Auto-Apply: Can randomize or automatically apply hotspots on the fly as you edit geometry.

Level Building Tools

  • Cube Cut: A 3-click drawing tool that cuts into existing geometry without creating messy N-gons or T-Junctions. It can create closed corridors, open tunnels, or folded planes depending on the cut depth.
  • Box Builder: A similar 3-click tool to rapidly draw and generate new cubes or planes directly onto existing faces or the grid.

Camera & Viewport Controls

  • Game-Style Navigation: Enables game-engine style WASD flying navigation in the 3D viewport.
  • Custom View Controls: Middle-mouse shortcuts for perspective orbiting and orthographic panning.
  • Dynamic Grid: Quick hotkeys to double or halve the grid size (which scales relative to Blender’s scene units), plus quick toggles for grid snapping and face overlays.

Export Enhancements

  • Custom .glb Panel: Adds an Anvil-specific panel to the standard glTF export screen.
  • Game-Ready Toggles: Options to “Separate Loose Meshes” (helpful for game engine occlusion culling) and “Scale Apply Modifiers”.
  • Quick Export: A 1-click export button that remembers your previous settings to bypass popups.

Key Links

Anvil Level Design Tool

Trenchbroom Level Editor

You can learn more about the Anvil Level Design Tool for Blender and see it in action in the video below. If you’re “short” on time, there is also this short version of the video.

Scroll to Top