Porting Halo 2 Zanzibar, pictures &questions about static mesh, collisions & lighting

[Computron]

OK, so I got myself the Zanzibar map after it was extracted from Halo 2 XBOX,
and I figured it would be cool to port it to UDK so that I could play it on my PC
or maybe even iPhone.

I got it running in 3DS Max and fixed up a few problems with inverted UVs and
various geometry errors to get it up to par with the original.

The problem is the map is comprised of one HUGE bsp mesh with a few instanced
static meshes here and there and all texture mapping work done in ONE Multi/Sub-object material with 40+ sub-objects.

1) I read that having in excess of 10 multi-subs causes inefficiency because of draw calls, can anyone elaborate?
2) The map has no collisions upon importing to UDK, is there anyway to have UDK automatically generate collisions that match the mesh exactly like Halo 2 Vista's havok does? I dont want to block it out with UDK BSP and definitly dont want to block it out in 3ds max primitives.
3) When I import this map into UDK as a huge "monolithic" static mesh, the lighting created by light mass is very poor, there are barely any shadows, seems very low res. I have a skylight set to a low ambient brightness and a dominant light set to the correct orientation and brightness. Do Huge static meshes not light correctly?



Picture Time, Click to expand to 1080p:

3ds Max scene, with all the maps in Multi-Subobject


Before lighmass lighting vs after (Very poor quality-low res)

[percydaman]

Having it all as one object just isn't feasible. When you calculate your lighting, its going to try and create one lightmap for the one huge object. Not even a 4k lightmap would be sufficient. You need to break up your scene into as many objects as possible.

[Computron]

So, if I break up each part of the Halo 2 BSP mesh by sub-object material assignment and import it, how would I go about making collisions then? Does Unreal Engine only make collisions through primitives and k-dop? How does the landscape tool make its collision? is it possible to use landscape for concave terrain?

Also, what does UDK do differently for lightmaps made from many small static meshes? Those can light just fine with less than 4k.

Also, I still want to know about the multi-subobject texturing shortcomings if anyone can elaborate.

[zen-tex]

hey can you upload that map for download i need it for a project im doing and how did you get i tryed to rip it of the xbox but i fail

[Sci-Fi]

The map has no collisions upon importing to UDK, is there anyway to have UDK automatically generate collisions?

Go to the "Unreal Static Mesh Editor" and make sure the three boxes are unchecked
Use Simple Box Collision
Use Simple Line Collision
Use Simple Rigid Body Collision

The other stuff I cant help you with.