Question Is there a way to use a blendshape to sequentially hide part of a mesh

Hello everyone,

I hope someone can give us a tip on how to do this!

Some contest:
Roboplant is a farming game where you build multiple hydroponic machines and grow fruits and vegetables

Currently we are trying to optimize performances by doing the following:
1. One single skinned mesh composed of multiple small plants grows with a blend shape
2. Once the grow is completed the skinned mesh get disabled and we enable each plant mesh (not skinned) so that the harvesting looks more real and it's one plant at the time (like the image below)



We have two issues:
- having all those small mesh renderers is still not the most performant solutions
- if the plants dies when the plant is still growing then we don't have a way to let the worker clean it one at the time. Unless we change it the full grown version but it would look ugly.

So we are looking for a better way to do this. We asked in the other subforum if there is a shader graph that could help us out but I am also wondering if there is a way to do it with blendshapes or even if there is a solution using animations.

Is there a way we could use one single mesh with multiple plants and then somehow hide them one by one on need?

Thanks and have a great day,
Paolo