Not animated, or destructible, or anything else fancy. Just STATIC meshes. I COULD later make them animated, or destructible or whatever; if that was even possible. But in order to do that in the first place, I have to make sure that all these objects benefit from the single draw call hypothesis. So at first, do not think about anything but STATIC, simply static meshes all sharing the same material/shader. If you’ve worked with 3ds max (or Maya/Blender w/e I only mostly know Max, but I believe you can do this in all these 3d modeling programs) you can have any number of objects, combine them into a single object then apply ‘Unwrap UVW’ modifier (basically to UV map them). After this is done, you can detach any number of “elements/subobjects/we” and make them different objects. Now all those different objects will still share the same uv space, the same texture and the same material. Now export them all as FBX and in UE4 when importing DO NOT tick ‘Combine Meshes’. As such, when imported in ue4 they will still have the same material but be different objects/meshes/assets. I have just done this in UE4 and works good, but I’m doing tests to see whether by placing all these objects in the scene a single or multiple (per object) draw calls are required to render them all (I repeat once again; different objects, same material, same textures, each one is simply mapped on different uv islands/clusters on the same uv layout). I would benefit from opinions of more experienced people to figure this out.
[IFF I make sure that there is indeed a single draw call to render all these STATIC objecs, then I will proceed to make some of them animated, some of them destructible some of them whatever and CHECK whether they still need a single draw call to render them all. If this last sentence confuses you, do not think about it at all. It doesn’t matter.]