This doesn’t seem to be possible at all but is really the preferred way to optimize batching for a lot of games, especially since Unitys dynamic batching seems to be very slow on the CPU side.
Essentially I want to be able to attach a component which would create static batches on everything beneath it. So I could put it on a sorting group, artists dresses the scene, and now as a part of the build I want to generate a static mesh out of it. Color is a vertex attribute anyway, so that’s no problem, material just needs to match, this can pretty easily handled with texture atlases. Ideally you’d talk to the guy behind the SpriteUV tool to get some decent contour generation going ( the one in Unity doesn’t really work ). As long as the the sprites are additively blended vertices can be clipped by looking at render order & generating new ones that respect the UV. One should be able to specify the bucket size, but a general guideline for a 2D game with a panning camera is half the dims of where the frustum intersects the layer, that gives a constant batch amount of 9 per layer. No longer do you have to either get bad batching or an insane amount of overdraw. The resulting meshes wouldn’t be sprites, but they can still have the sprite materials & really as long as you don’t Z sort them & just respect the sorting order used for sprites there shouldn’t be much problems.