I am using my own custom game engine for my project. I just finished writing a graphics engine, complete with a robust FBX file loader, and I am now integrating Bullet for my physics.

I am trying to choose a good approach/set of tools to allow me to quickly design static collision geometry to match my level geometry - a simplistic level editor if you will. I have experimented with an approach of using Maya entirely for my level editing - essentially I can draw meshes on a 'Collision' display layer. Maya's automatic mesh naming conventions make it fairly straightforward to distinguish and parse mesh objects on this layer into the various collision shapes available in Bullet. You can adopt additional mesh/node naming and attribute tagging conventions, and write them into the FBX parser, code in grouping and redundancy optimizations, etc etc.

Alternatively, while reading through Bullet's documentation I saw reference to both Maya and COLLADA plugin's. Maya 2015 features Bullet integration for simulation, and exporting to these "Alembic" file formats. I'm researching but still not yet clear on if this feature is useful to me and how quickly I can get it up and running - I am using FBX SDK 2013 so I would probably need to upgrade my loader (and maybe write an Alembic loader?) and that's time consuming. Still, if this interface allows me to create/parse collision shapes directly through Maya and the FBX SDK, as opposed to the ad-hoc approach described above, that may be worth the time investment

Then there's the COLLDA file format which apparently has some conventions for collision/physics objects. I am not yet clear on if Maya (or perhaps another editor) is useful for creating graphics and collision geometry in tandem and exporting to COLLADA files. I suppose I could utilize ASSIMP for loading collada files and whatever, but I'm not sure if its faster or better to put in place then my Maya-only approach. I am trying to avoid super high level tools. I kinda like my Maya-only approach since it requires me to get my hands dirty with the scene construction and working with Bullet, since this project is largely a learning experience for me.

Advice, opinions and perspectives would be appreciated!