I want to recreate a scene in UDK but I am struggling to decide whether I want to just use meshes that I will create in 3ds max, or if I should be using brushes to create the most simple geometry. Obviously if I were going to make a simplisic building I'd use brushes, but the scene I want to re-create is a bit more complex than that.

I've got a bit of experience with brush based editors such as Valve's hammer editor, and I like it, but it feels like there is too much limitation.

What do you guys do when doing environments?

BSP is more for blocking out, these days. I'm not sure it's ever really used in final games, anymore.
I would suggest using meshes.

As Joopson already said BSP is mostly used for blocking out and even that is nowadays rather done in a 3d modeling package than inside the editor. But if you look at the maps that epic ships with the UDK you can see that they use BSP sometimes for simple flooring or straight walls.

Besides that im always encounter heavy problems when working with BSP. Whenever i start blocking out a level with pure BSP the editor becomes more and more laggy, so that i have to rebuild the lighting as soon as i make changes to a BSP brush. Im not sure if im the only one that encounter this kind of problems, but you see that it could slow your workflow down rather than speed it up.

And last but not least, meshes will give you way more control and flexibility, like vertex painting, controlable lods, far more details, destructions, poly-reduction and so on.

thanks guys, I'm gonna just hop into 3ds max and start working at this.

Question though, say that you're working on a building off of undefined reference such as concept art, what is the best way to establish proportion? I'm struggling to start this small project that I want to do because I don't know where to start!

Originally Posted by FractaL

thanks guys, I'm gonna just hop into 3ds max and start working at this.

Question though, say that you're working on a building off of undefined reference such as concept art, what is the best way to establish proportion? I'm struggling to start this small project that I want to do because I don't know where to start!

Well, keep in mind that an average character in UDK is usually 96uu tall. I'll usually make a box or something that is 32x32x96 to represent the shape of a character, then model things in relation to that person. Also, it will help to just drop stuff in UDK and run around to make sure it all feels right as well.

For scale, you always need to start with character height. Default Unreal character height I believe, is 96 units.

From there, just make sure your Max units are set the same way. Then start building your modular bits as proxies - simple box shapes - just to get proportions down. You can either import and test those in Unreal, or just use grid snap in Max to make sure everything lines up before continuing with the main meshes.

Thanks to the two of you, I appreciate the help!

FYI, you should also be able to do a blockout in the editor, then export that as OBJ as reference when modelling.