How to handle a 1000 piece environments

I have a set made of 1000s of objects
My question is it better to merge the set down into maybe 10 objects before I export to UE. Or assemble all the pieces in a blueprint?
Does camera culling still happen with blueprint assembled assets?

Yes its better to merge them into fewer objects for performance reasons as well as making your project more manageable, e.g you can merge an entire house into 1 object, or a fence… it wouldn’t be fun for you if you had to deal with every single picket on a fence and wouldn’t be fun for the engine either. I wouldn’t recommend assembling the assets in a blueprint unless you have a good reason to do it, Blueprints could make it easier for you to manage your project but it wouldn’t help in terms of performance. I’m not sure about camera Culling.

on that note though dont merge things that will be spaced out too far in your level as that can cause issues with culling and lods.

Thanks for your responses.

My master environment is like a haunted house. some rooms are square some are L shaped some are Helix shaped. I assume from what @Thompson said in regards to culling and load problems, that these room should be broken down into sub components?

Thanks for your responses.

My master environment is like a haunted house. some rooms are square some are L shaped some are Helix shaped. I assume from what @Thompson said in regards to culling and load problems, that these room should be broken down into sub components?

you should probably be ok in your case. what i meant was grouping things that are really far away. for instance if you had a big open field with two houses 10,000 units apart then you wouldnt want them grouped together in teh same object. if your objects are within 5000 units your probably fine. though you still need to be aware that the more you group things the harder it becomes to move individual items within the level.