Duplicating and mirroring an object then keeping it separate

Hi, is it possible to duplicate and mirror an object, but keep the two completely separate? I tried using the mirror modifier but that will cause the mirror image to be uneditable and joined together with the main object. I don’t want to use the mirror transform command because that will simply turn one of the scale values negative, causing a variety of issues when I export it later.

Add a mirror modifier to your object, then apply the mirror modifier, go into edit mode, select all the vertices that are part of the mirrored portion, hit P and choose Selection.

Um when it creates the mirror, it creates it right on top of the original object and overlapping it, making it very difficult to select. There’s no other way to mirror an object in blender…? It seems very clumsy that you have to manually select every single vertice of an object just to separate it, I mean what if the object is very complex?

Change Pivot to 3d cursor, place cursor where you want mirror point to be and Shift-D duplicate Object (all in Object mode) and Ctrl-M mirror on some axis e.g Ctrl-M,x or Ctrl-M,xx.

I mentioned in OP that I already tried that method but it simply results in one of the scale coords being a negative value, which has problems when being exported, because negative values for size aren’t accepted in games and such.

Make the object origin the mirror point before you follow the steps I posted.

And as a final step, once you have two separate objects, select the ‘new’ one and go to the Object menu > Apply > Scale. That will get rid of the inverted vertices.