3D placement

Hi folks,
i am just getting started in 3d now an was wondering how people go about making their 3d levels. Modeeling and such is not a problem as i am pretty nifty with 3ds max, but how does everyone actually work out the placement of the entities in blitz?
The only way i can think to do it atm is to place it numerically in the code, run the program and see if its placed right, if not move it a bit, run the code again etc.... Surely there must be a better way. Is it possible to translate an entire scene from 3ds max and keep the placements etc? Or has anyone done a graphical editor or something similar?
thanks for the help
~V~

It is pretty simple to write a placement editor, and I routinely write custom editors for my games. There are a few general purpose placement editors like Droplet and Itemizer available. As for exporting entity placement out of 3D Studio Max, you can write a Maxscript to write the placement data (ie. position and rotation) to a text file and then read that file when loading your level.