> it wouldn't be easy because these scans are highly detailed and so would require too many polygons to be loaded at once In practice a a 3d artist could very

> it wouldn't be easy because these scans are highly detailed and so would require too many polygons to be loaded at once In practice a a 3d artist could very easily create low poly models for these objects. For that low poly replica the high poly model can serve as a useful reference. (But to be honest many artist can just look at images of the object and do the same.) This is not even hard, on the order of minutes (for something like the Rosetta Stone) or days (for something seriously detailed). In this case where there is a will, there is a way. In fact this "reduction" step very often part of the game creation pipeline already. Monsters/characters/objects very often get sculpted at a higher resolution and then those high resolution meshes are reduced down to something more manageable (while they bake the details into a bump map texture, or similar).