Awesome crab. one thing though, and i guess this isn't finished, but the uniformity of the color clashes a bit with the high level of detail imo. It could use more macro level variation, such as vertical gradient (there's a bit of that in the concept) or patterning.
You stated you applied a swift loop then removed some edges, did you also remove the vertices associated with those edges? Swift loop will only show up if it can make a loop along a ring of geometry.
But what about the file size ? An highpoly with enough vertices to have a good polypaint is way too heavy to upload, and they have a rather small size limit ( 64mb or 1 millions polys ). So they need a texture on a decimated mesh.
I am using UDK for this. I was thinking vertext lighting isn't a very good choice because the plants are around the size of a person, at most, and that won't be big meshes with enough vertices for this kind of lighting. Am I wrong?
do you got your lightmaps on your meshes working ? or do you bake your lighting into vertices in some of the props? because I can´t figure out where these shadows on the ground do come from....
What methods are you using to make the bed sheets on the mattress? Did you simply move vertices around as anything else? I was thinking I would sculpt mine out or even drop a cloth simulation onto to it.
I'm only seeing a difference of about 6 triangles, if I'm seeing things right. But while the one on the right has fewer triangles, it quite possibly has more vertices in the end as it must have more UV splits.
These scripts are still used in Max, not Maya, it just brings some of the Maya stuff to Max, like being able to use a hotkey to align vertices and rotate. I posted them there http://boards.polycount.net/showthread.php?p=1135878#post1135878.
This is week 1 of Semester B and this project is of to a great start, fronted and its still got over four months of development "The Resistance" - 3rd Year Project. https://80.lv/articles/vertical-slice-building-a-medieval-city/
More UV seams do increase the vertex count, which slightly hinders performance, but under most circumstances, the performance hit of a larger texture size is going to be much larger than the performance hit of a few extra vertices.