Hi Benjamin,
nice work!
Also thank you for the test!
Could you upload an untextured screenshot, so that the polygons are visible?
I also have a feeling that using Zbrush can be really good for extreme situations, but might rarely be worth the effort. Of course, the internal simplifier in RC (or others) won’t do as good a job as a carefully prepared model in Zbrush, but I think good enough for many cases.
And I say it again, from 300 mil to about 600.000 is a tremendous step. On average, that means that 500 polygons will be merged into one! Imagine how much of the small detail will be lost.
The whole thing might be different, if one tries to stay within a certain limit. From what I read about the subject I thought that factor 10 is pushing it already in terms of ruining too much details. And especially if you cannot reduce too much polycount, the quality of the algorythms should play a larger role than with extreme examples because every polygon counts. And if the algorythms leave too much details on even surfaces, the polygons will be missing in the details.