You can use the ‘bLightAttachmentsAsGroup’ property on the parent component to shadow it and all attachments as one group, which will prevent the shadow artifacts (and improve performance). You can use the ‘SetMasterPoseComponent’ function to only animate one ‘master’ skeletal mesh and have others just use its animation. The main reason for merging meshes it to reduce section count in your scene. If you don’t combine textures when you merge, you won’t actually be reducing your section count. 1 mesh with 5 materials or 5 meshes with 1 material each are both 5 ‘draw calls’. I hope that helps clarify a bit!