So I'm looking for an easy way to tessellate a plane in blender, where the centre of the plane has a lot of detail (tris/quads) while the edges have very little with detail being interpolated in between.
Is it possible to do this solely in blender or will I have to write a script to implement it?
You can do that with decimate modifier using vertex group.
Create a plane, switch to Edit Mode and hit W button, then from the menu select Subdivide and in operator panel change number of subdivision to 100.
Switch to Weight Paint Mode, select Weight Gradient and start painting from the center out in one stroke.
Then in Weight Gradient operator panel or by using F6 button change Type to Radial.
Switch back to edit mode, add Decimate Modifier and in Vertex Group name select group that was created by the weight paint.
Then change the parameters of the modifier to get desired result.
