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Instances are lightweight copies of an object that do not contain any geometry data, but rather maintain a link to the original object. Because each instance only stores a limited amount of data – such as a transform matrix and sometimes material assignment information – they have several advantages over regular copies:
A scene with 1300 instances of a high resolution Buddha model (approximately 880,000 triangles per instance). Over a billion instanced triangles.
In Maya, a mesh is instanced when the mesh shape node appears multiple times in the DAG. You can create instances of an existing mesh using the Duplicate or Duplicate Special commands. In addition to storing a unique transform (position, rotation and scale) and unique visibility options per instance, Maya allows each instance of a mesh to have unique material assignments. This is a very powerful feature in that it allows for some visual variety between instances that can be difficult to achieve if all instances must share identical material assignments. Redshift fully supports instanced meshes in Maya including per-instance material assignments.