Advice needed BSP or Static Mesh?

[manhuntworld]

Hi guys, going to be working on a Mod soon, its basically going to be a sandbox style mod using UDK but what I need to know as the level design or your recommendations is for the buildings in the level, should I be creating them in the editor using the builder brushe with custom some custom geometry editing to make the buildings or should i create the actual model in 3ds max and import it as a static mesh?

baring in mind that most of these building are going to be interactive, so the player will be using them for cover and just generally walking around inside the environment.

any advice on this would be greatly apprieicated

thanks.

[AlexM]

if you take a look at the example map that comes with UDK you can see that a huge portion of it is static meshes. It should give you a pretty good idea.

[manhuntworld]

Yeah i thought as much. well guess i better get modelling then lol.

cheers.

[sarge mat]

Yep when it comes to Unreal BSP not not visible that often. Its all about using mesh's to make bigger structures.

[Aalexanderrr]

It highly depends on a style you are going for. If you are doing something simplistic, correct choice would be BSP. If you want something complicated, go for Static Meshes although I'd say brushes with good normal \ shiny mapped textures would look the same for the most part.

[Steppenwolf]

Take a look at the modular set that Minotauro was working on. That's the future. The example maps in UDK look good but they are a few years old now and you can tell the heavy use of meshes was something new for them. Too many tiny meshes in odd sizes and shapes. If you go that same route it will cost you much more time.

[manhuntworld]

thanks for the input guys. it really helped me

[Serenius]

Always, always, always build as much as you can in BSP while prototyping, and replace as much of that BSP as you can with static meshes once you're done polishing gameplay and have moved to the visual passes.