Small props and variations help

Anthonr4g

Hi everyone, I'm currently working on an environment where I need to have some kind of shelf with bottles like this one: 

As you can see there are many elements and I would like to integrate this in an optimized way with several variations but I don't want to have too many materials per bottle. 

I have several solutions but I would like your opinion: 

1. Model a single bottle and apply an atlas texture for my variations. (I might have a lot of small bottle mesh)

2. Model the shelf and bottles and make only one mesh (I know it's better to have a single mesh than a lot of small ones but I'm afraid it doesn't look so good in terms of texel density and I'd be limited later if I want to change the position of some elements)

3. Use a material for the bottle and another material with a kind of atlas of my labels with correctly mapped uvs (this solution looks good to me but it's the same, I might have a lot of small bottle mesh)

obviously I'm sure there are other solutions but I didn't really find anything that would allow me to do this in an optimized way.

if you have any suggestions I would be happy to read them.

Thank you in advance.

Finnn

I would model the shelf and the bottles seperately, so you could fill the shelf with other detail props.
Modeling the bottles as one single mesh is a good idea, because it will drastically reduce the amount of draw calls that are necessary to render your prop. The CPU has to tell the GPU what to render for each mesh and material in your scene, so your best option performance wise is to have a single texture atlas for your combined mesh.