Where to start for UT2004 modding?

[Phopojijo]

technicaly you can build your entire level in max, if you design it right, all you have to do is export all the pieces and assemble them in unrealed.
Halo is a very unique engine. I don't know of any others that use max as much as it does.
If only there was an engine that had all the high points of Halo and unreal it would be the perfect engine to map for.

In UnrealEngine3 this is true... however for UT2004 there is a few serious issues with this, one being the most serious:

Static Meshes can only be vertex lit.

In UT2004 you'd ideally want to build the walls, ramps, floors, using Brushes... then place decorating objects around made in 3dsMax.

In UT3 you can still do this... but the world is moving towards modeling your geometry in a 3d program and importing into the editor. There's also no need for portaling... if a part of a mesh is visible, the whole thing is visible... if not -- it's not. It's really that simple. Just make sure to split up your mesh enough to occlude properly.

That's how I'm doing Skyhook.

Then also can be lightmapped and dynamically lit as well so you can add that extra lighting detail on very low polygon meshes.