I am looking for a good workflow on mesh decimation without loosing fine details.
My subjects for this workflow are rock art sites. They are typical large areas, from 2x1 meters, up to 50x5 meters. Some of theses sites have carvings covering a large percent of the surface, with typical carving depth of between 1-5 mm. If i process 200+ (24mpx) images on ultra high, I will end up killing my hardware. Even if I could manage to process it, it would take a lot of processing hours, and the end result would be useless because there are no way I could disseminate a 300M poly model to any user, let alone publish it on any standard platform. So what I need is a good workflow that A) reduces time spent modelling "un-interesting areas" at more than necessary quality whilst going ultra on points of interest, i.e carvings, and B) decimate mesh without loosing fine details.
I know this is a lot to ask, if at all possible, but I am hoping for some ideas that might solve some of my challenges.