How should I handle a large number of objects? I am working on updating an importer for Structure Synth and I am realizing that it might actually not be practical. In structure synth, you can create thousands and thousands of objects, each of which will be exported. Consequently, you would need to make a material for each one as the color variations can be infinite as well, in other words a slightly variation of color for each one. Now, the exporter does this well, however it seems to me the scene becomes unwieldy very fast. Managing 1000 objects and their corresponding materials is basically impossible.

Right now all I can get out of SS is a translation matrix and RGB values for each object, sphere or cube which I make an ico sphere or cube out of in Blender and then assign a material with RGB value.

Is there anyway to instance the objects and materials but retain the all the different colors without having to have all of those objects and materials?

Thanks in advance.
Blender supports Object Color to override the Material RGB Diffuse.


Object properties, set a color there (also possible via Python)
Link all Objects/Meshes with a single Material, with option Object Color set.