Thanks NomadSoul - I'll see if I can really make the rapiers & display case area impressive. I'm thinking that introducing some verticality might make the piece a little less stale in my eyes perhaps?
Run a profiler in-game, see whether you're Transform-bound (generally vertices) or Fillrate-bound (generally materials). In practice tho it's hella more complicated. ;) http://wiki.polycount.com/wiki/Framerate_Optimization_Tips https://simonschreibt.de/gat/renderhell/
If you want just cut out the part in a cylinder, then you can just use a boolean and then attach the vertices and add necessary edges to make proper topology for smoothing. Im no pro, but that what i got in result:
Looks great, only thing I would add/change would be to have thumbs running across the side instead of the names and trying to fit it in so it didn't break the tangent of the line cutting down vertically in the background.
You just need to scale your UVs vertically so they are much much taller. Right now your UVs are telling the texture to tile 1 time, meaning its getting stretched the entire length of the track.
ZRemesher is not meant for high resolution meshes with millions of points; it is meant to give you something more basic that you can then subdivide as needed to get the required level of vertices in order to sculpt on. Perhaps you are mistaking it for dynamesh?
Snap the vertices after creating the loop. Disable maintain component spacing for bonus points (and the ability to snap them all at once) It's maya, if it seems like it should be a 1 click solution, you'll inevitably need 3
The model looks good, I especially like the specular on the scoop. But I think you could manage the track details with a normal map. Also, do you really need all those vertical slices in the seat?
edit 2: And in all cases of unwrapping cubes or such, you'd end up with an UV seam at many of the places already, even with beveled edges, so they'd still count as more vertices than a split up cube.
That white/red texture appears when your physics proxy has too many vertices. So either don't physicalize if it's only for viewing or make a separate low-poly mesh and set the physicalization to PhysProxyNoDraw in the shader.