I've been downloading quite a lot of hood deco recently, and during my usual sorting/bundling/compressing process I noticed that objects that are obviously recolors of the same mesh are actually clones, which means the files contain a huge number of duplicated meshes.

As I understand, hood deco is technically not recolorable in the way build/buy objects can be. However I think it is possible to reference the mesh from the GMND instead of copying the GMDC resource with each new clone, thus saving quite a lot of space. Actually, I experimented with it on some of Criquette's deco cars and it worked very well.




So now I'm wondering, is there a good reason why creators don't do this? (apart from the fact that you have to keep the maser mesh file, just like a repositoried set)
Can I use this method to compress my CC or is this somehow not a "proper" way to reference meshes, and can cause issues or conflicts?

I think a lot of people don't know. I do it all the time with fence "recolors", I tick the box reference original mesh so my recolor doesn't need the mesh. I've not looked at hood deco, but it's possible you could "recolor" Maxis hood deco the same way.

I see, just like many things it's maybe just out of habit. I never created hood deco myself so I don't know what is common practice, but I heard of this for fences indeed