I think it’s worth noting that the conclusions of sutemp are incorrect with respect to Panda3D, since hardware Instancing is the use of for a specific type of game. Out-of-the-box support doesn’t make any sense, as it may be redundant.
Panda3D does not restrict the user in this technique, there is a lot of code in the forum examples proving this.
As for creating software instances, panda conducts it in accordance with the principles of OOP, you do not need to use anything superfluous, you can load one box into the scene 1000 times, while the data of one will be loaded into RAM. Only when the attributes are changed, the data affected by the change will be duplicated. However, this does not really affect the rendering speed in any way, since the attributes and transformation of the object into graphic memory will be transferred 1000 times.
Hardware instances solves this problem, its application actually depends on the programmer’s qualifications and panda does not impose any restrictions for this.