How do I correctly reduce geometry on part of a mesh? Good afternoon,
I already know that there are easy ways for reducing face count for the entire model. However I am trying to find a way to reduce faces only on specific parts of my mesh while keeping it deformation and rendering-friendly for animation.



From youtube tutorials I managed to figure that all I can do is to manually dissolve edges and verices and create new edges to form triangles to connect large faces with the smaller ones as follows (I must avoid faces with more than 4 vertices as far as I know):



Is this the "good practice" way of character modeling? Will the model UV unwrap, animate and render properly afterwards? (I know the example mesh from the screenshot is not a character, but I will need to create one and sculpt details on parts of the character). Or is there an easier way of doing this? Please help.
You can try the decimate modifier. It can take a vertex group so first add the faces you want less detailed into a group, then select it in the modifier.