Perna, are you using Marius's Radial Symmetry modifier or are you doing radial symmetry manaully, or perhaps with a custom system of wired parameters and attribute holders?
You could but it's about more than placement. It's a whole coordinate system. Every action is relative to the workplane. It's really, really powerful when you get into it.
having some difficulties with this shape: it's not just a simple ended piece, it curves to fit the bottom of the slide, and the rail system almost tapers...cant seem to get a right polygon flow here. and here's the ref:
You do the high poly, then decimate/lowpoly, then bake. If you're using blender, you also wanna learn how to use the split edges modifier. It's basically blender's Smoothing groups system. :) Good luck!
What would be the most efficient way of modelling, or rather, remodelling an existing flat-ish modular piece (pic1) in blender to fit a corner shape like in the other pictures? The perfect case scenario is such that preserves UVs. The example in the images is not mine. My own attempt is the last pic. Ironically, it would…
If you haven't already I suggest you take a look at MeshFusion in Modo. It's a different kind of boolean system. The advantage is that it's non-destructive and you can do very complex intersections. But the downside is that it returns a rather dense mesh, so it's good for highpoly but not so much for lowpoly.