Lot of small holes in a sphere / round shape for game I need to model sth like this



but with like 3-4x holes. Will be used in an VR app, so I have to take a look at the poly count.

I was wondering if there is a more effective way of doing this than just cutting every hole in tha sphere (which is crazy difficult for a newbie like me?).

Can I cut the holes maybe in the texture or use some modifier to accelerate the process?

I've found this, which create a crazy amount of polygons. 

And this, but here can't find the way to make a closed sphere instead of a tube
Just use textures. Unless the player is going to be interacting with the holes in some meaningful way, they are just decoration and do not need to be modelled.

The texture could either use transparency, or just set the color to black and specularity to zero.