!!!!!!! That image is amazing, not to mention a dataset in the billions of triangles! I have a lot to learn that's for sure! Thanks for the interest, you all are life savers for beginning game designers like me :)

A typical level will be a combination of indoor and outdoor, mostly resembling urban neighborhoods/cities. My test level right now consists of a cul-de-sac neighborhood, with one main house at the end of the circle, the street, and several side houses with fence and backyards.

Players can start out at any point in the neighborhood, so they very well could start outside, run into a house, explore, go back outside, go into another house, etc. I guess that's why I'm a bit confused as to how to proceed since I don't have the luxury of keeping the player in a nicely confined house.

That's why I thought if the player was inside of a house, maybe a good way to go would be to use an ABT to quickly cull away the rest of the neighborhood and even somehow the rest of the rooms in the house to quickly isolate which room the player was in. Then I thought about using portals from that point on, but only if the player was inside the house. If they were outside, ABT would be all that was used.

However triangle count even with shadows and the entire neighborhood in the frustum was 400K, so maybe I don't even need partitioning as mentioned, however when I do get larger datasets (i.e. an entire city is a level) I would like to have some kind of an action plan. I hope that gives some better info, thanks.

Sounds good, thanks dmatter and everyone for the advice