What way is the most optimized to change characters?

So, i’m trying to replicate trine’s character change mechanic and i did it in two ways

First one, only changing the pawn’s mesh and testing what mesh is active at time for some exclusive actions of each one.

Second one is possessing another pawn and changing their positions.~

Now, what makes the procesing most heavy? wich one should be used to optimize the process?

Changing meshes will be much lighter than changing pawns and their location