...the meshes and render them in a single call. With access to Mesh.colors and Mesh.CombineMeshes, it might be possible. I just worry Udon won't be fast enough to iterate over everything each frame. The meshes are small-- maybe I can keep them in memory?

I might be able to do this in Udon, though I don't know if it's fast enough. We have access to edit meshes and combine meshes in Udon, so in theory each frame I can override the vertex colors of each mesh instance in a way that the shader can read to render the correct variant, then combine all...

...batching but this would mean I need a way to render all variants of each model with the exact same material. I could also settle for having less materials. Maybe I could have one material for each color/mesh combo and figure out a way to do just the decal variants in the same mat.

In this case I'm instantiating each mesh instance at runtime because this is for another web loading thing and I have no idea how many, where, or what variant of each model to spawn until the world is loaded. I think this prevents me from using static objects. I was hoping to make use of dynamic...

Full info: I have 4 meshes I may need to render many instances of. They're unskinned renderers and each have 16 color variations and 16 decal variations (1024 variants total). This is certainly going to require a custom shader, and I'm down to learn, but I need a point in the right direction.

I've seen someone do color variation before by reading imperceivable scale differences between each mesh renderer to encode a hue offset to apply to vertex colors on each model instance. I can probably figure out the vertex color reading and hue shifting, but I'm unsure how the scale trick works.

i can't believe i took like 4 takes of the kuuta photo and the final one turned out blurry 😭
next time for sure 4 more shots of kuutas, hopefully not blurry

Also want to say thanks for hosting @k-9.codes and nice at welcoming new people/photographers. Plus, they take some awesome photos! I recommend to people who are interested and wanting to join others taking photos to come tagalong!