I think so too (what Joe says).
So if you have a very big indoor space, say aircraft hangar, I think it would be best to separate it to logical portions like floor, ceiling, walls... basically making big lumps that are seen when you look at that way, and not when when you turn for example 90 deg.
So for example opposite walls should be separate objects because you can't see them both at the same time and most often the same goes for floor and ceiling. This chopping of course increases the number of objects (surfaces) but it still makes everything faster, IF you have enough polys on those separate objects (so that the culling would have any "speed up" effect).
IMO if a room has max 2K polys it is not worth chopping at all... modern hardware does NOT care if it has to render 200 or 2000 polygons if they are same surface. Bigger than that and you'll start to see the hit.
But optimization is hard because it depends also greatly from the hardware used to render the 3D, Voodoo and Radeon9700 don't behave same way... best advice would be that you should try and experiment different ways yourself.
So if you have a very big indoor space, say aircraft hangar, I think it would be best to separate it to logical portions like floor, ceiling, walls... basically making big lumps that are seen when you look at that way, and not when when you turn for example 90 deg.
So for example opposite walls should be separate objects because you can't see them both at the same time and most often the same goes for floor and ceiling. This chopping of course increases the number of objects (surfaces) but it still makes everything faster, IF you have enough polys on those separate objects (so that the culling would have any "speed up" effect).
IMO if a room has max 2K polys it is not worth chopping at all... modern hardware does NOT care if it has to render 200 or 2000 polygons if they are same surface. Bigger than that and you'll start to see the hit.
But optimization is hard because it depends also greatly from the hardware used to render the 3D, Voodoo and Radeon9700 don't behave same way... best advice would be that you should try and experiment different ways yourself.