For sure - to ^ that.
I was simply referring to a structure with pillars and curtain walls between them and some struts supporting beams. I would never suggest that a mapper create BSP's for something that people will never see.
That would be crazy!
I am merely trying to put forward one way to avoid the incredible blockiness and bogusity that some buildings that are just hollowed cubes tend to have. Prolly fine for tank maps when people are driving past them fast but for infantry maps where people are going to fight over the buildings then any tricks for creating a realistic looking environment for low performance cost are valid.
I don't know any 3d-max or Maya (yet) but for converting, say, 6 upright pillars, 3 connecting beams and 6 struts to support the beams, then the convert -> mesh tool in ROEd is adequate (
When you use it though, make sure that you have got the texturing right and not looking tiled between elements in the overall object before you convert. Also don't try to include any subtractions in the group that you are converting or it won't work.
Personally (and this is purely personal) I would not use meshes for large bits of wall or anything else that I want to have realistic-looking shadows falling onto. Shadows on meshes don't work properly in UE2.5 If you're using Maya or some other pro 3D package you could actually do the lighting/shadows in tha package and then export them -so long as your light is in the same relative position in both your 3d and the editting programmes it would work.
*edit - I just gave the situation some consideration and I certainly concede that the cube with subtractions has a lot less vertices than a bunch of walls/floors etc. but an interesting point is this: If you want to make a wall with pillars there is no difference in number of vertices (or even number of faces) between modelling the pillars and walls individually or doing one brush and subtracting. Here's why:
So the number of faces and brushes is the same. One thing that militates against using the 3 brush scenario may well be texture depth - you have two sets of textures at the interface of the brushes basically sitting there, doing nothing. This means that you prolly should use subtractions from an existing brush, rather than multiple brushes, if your texture depth view is showing loads of red.