Hi @JR_Miller,
You still have some options outside of ISMs and MASS, I’ll go over them briefly here:
- If you’re dealing with skeletal meshes you can merge meshes to reduce draw calls.
- Expanding on the above, Mutable is a more feature rich way of dealing with this, particularly for the use case of customisable characters.
- Merging Actors is another route you can take, which by the sounds of it may be more in line with what you’re looking for. Just note that this can involve some tweaking of settings to get an output you’re happy with.
- The approach I would recommend first is using Static Mesh Components under the same Actor. You’re correct that Actors have some overhead, as with components themselves to a degree. You should be able to make your static mesh components fairly light, however, by disabling a variety of things that you may not need that can be enabled by default. E.g. collision, physics, implementing LODs, etc. Here is a very good resource on this topic.
I personally would probably not go for taking the approach of implementing a more minimal Static Mesh Actor class, but of course that should also be possible.
I hope this gives you some paths forward.
Thanks,
Hayden