Copy an Entire Rig easily

Overview:

Presently it is very difficult to copy an entire Rig. Ideally this should be as simple as selecting a rig and Ctrl+C/V. Would be especially useful for beginners using Rigify made rigs.

Details:

When you just Ctrl+C/V a rig made w Rigify, it does not correctly copy all elements including the bound mesh. However, it does somewhat work if you have another instance of blender running. Here are the current steps to duplicate a Rig:

• 1. You will need multiple instances of blender running. (For some reason. Copy+Paste from the same instance doesn't work, the skinned mesh is not copied/bound properly)
• 2. Open the source rig .blend in first instance of blender.
• 3. Select the entire hierarchy of the Rig, including children. Ctrl+C copy
• 4. In a new blender instance. Open the target .blend (or new one)
• 5. Ctrl+V
• 6. Create new collection. Put the WGT-RIG objects in it. Make not visible.
• 7. Object mode, select Rig. Enable the Skel Layers for pose CTRLs. Enter Pose mode.
• 8. Test the rig is poseable.
• 9. Rename every subobject of the Rig as #2:

Rig2_Main, Rig2_Metarig, Rig2_Geom, Rig2_Skin, Rig2_Hair, etc.

• 10. Return to Object mode. Translate the Rig2 over a bit.
• 11. From the first instance of blender, still open. Rig selected, Ctrl+C.
• 12. Ctrl+V. Paste.
• 13. Create new collection. Put the WGT-RIG objects in it. Make not visible.
• 14. Repeat steps 6-8 for duplicate rig.

Notes: This workaround workflow was tested in Blender 3.4.1 on Window 10

Proposal:

The goal is to achieve seamless copy+paste behavior of entire Rigs within a single instance of blender. Repeated use of paste should create N distinct, separately poseable copies of the original rig. I believe with a few internal changes to overall Rig behavior, this could work seamlessly without the above steps.

Development Tasks:

1. WGT-RIG objects should not paste to top-level. They should autorename and remain hidden from user.
2. Copy+paste a master Rig (+children) from the same instance of blender should give the same behavior as copy+paste from a second instance of blender. Currently only the copy+paste from another blender instance is correct.
3. Upon copy+paste of Rig ALL objects, including internal ones, should be renamed (eg. .001) to avoid naming conflicts of functional hidden objects with the duplicated rig.
4. The skeleton layers currently enabled as visible in the source rig used for primary control of the rig should be copied over to duplicate rig, so its not necessary to re-enable the rig control layers each time.
5. It should be easier to remain in Pose mode while switching rigs. This would allow multiple rigs to be posed w/o the mode switch.
6. When copy+pasting an entire rig, it would be nice if newly pasted rigs automatically translated the new rig by the bounding box dimensions. That is, repeated use of paste would create a line of non-overlapping distinctly poseable characters.

New Workflow:

The new workflow would be:

• Select a Rig. Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V