Okay, so here is a very simple example of what I am trying to achieve.
The plain effector is controlling the colour. I need this to be baked into the sphere material to be exported as either an FBX or an alembic (As I then need to import and export as .PATH from Blender)
Right now it is just a standard material with the color shader plugged into the color channel to read the effector. This does not have to be the way, maybe there is a better way to do this. I dont care how it needs to be done, just as long as the color channel is baked into the material much like if I had keyframed it on a material for each individual sphere (which works, but will be impractical for a setup where there will need to be 240 drones)
Please let me know how you would go about this. thanks