Joining Rigid Body objects after baking to shorten BVH building time I want to render a rigid body simulation with ~20k objects.
Because of that, Cycles needs about 5 minutes / frame to build only the BVH data of those 20k objects (and I have a powerful machine). Is there any way to join the objects to one single object while maintaining its individual movements? I tried baking the simulation to keyframes, but when I join the objects, their individual transformations merge as well.

Btw, I only tested this with a smaller simulation, because baking 20k objects to keyframes takes like ages (hasn't even finished yet...) So maybe there is another way to avoid the long BVH building time?
Thanks in advance for any help! :)
If you link the objects with &#9096; CtrlL > Object data, one copy of the mesh data will be shared between all 20k objects (as opposed to 20k copies of the same data).

While not as efficient as whole-object instances (e.g. dupli objects), AFAIK this is about as close as you can get while still keeping the rigid body sim.