hey guys,
i’ve got some knuckle protectors (all instances) on the left glove of a character which are all rotated differently.
Is there a way to mirror them over to the other side without loosing the instancing?
cheers chris
if the character is centered in the scene, snap cursor to center, then use the cursor as pivot point, and Alt+D to create a new set of instances, and use the mirror tool (dont remember the hotkey cause i always use scale but that flips the normal and i think that messes up with instances)
the hotkey to mirror is ctrl-d but this doesn’t work.
it places the object in the right place on the opposite site but the rotation is still wrong.
Alt+D creates a linked duplicate. Instancing options are: procedural duplication, particle system duplication, and linked libraries. Linked duplicate instances object data, but actual instance references the whole object.
Mirror hotkey is ctrl+M.
I haven’t yet found a great workflow for that either. Switching to using duplifaces would be good enough if mirror modifier would mirror them correctly for that purpose, but it doesn’t.
Example switches linked duplicates to using duplifaces, then mirror and correct the orientation manually
Attachments
instances_mirror.blend (109 KB)
many thanks for the video and the file!! will give it a try tomorrow 
strange that there is no 1-click solution for stuff like that.
anyway, many thanks for the effort
Rather than using the mirror operator you can add mirror modifiers to the objects and create and use a mirror object placed in the origin. That way you can have arbitrary locations for the objects but still get the mirror modifier functionality of having the object origin at the scene origin which obviously won’t work for linked mesh data.
Kind of strange but it works.