Thousands of animations on screen?

Hi everyone,

I am setting up a scene with a lot of humanoid and non-humanoid animated models on screen.
Of course, there is a performance issue here, since they are all skinned meshes.

I saw that animation instancing in the main technique used to save computational time on this, but I was wondering if there was another way?
For example, is it possible to have all models animate without a skinned mesh rendered (which might look bad on screen, but at least should save loads of computational time in theory)? Is it something possible to do?

Just thought I'd ask, I am no expert in animations.

Thanks in advance

 

You can disable the SkinnedMeshRenderer components, but what's the point of animating them then?