How to have duplicate character mesh driven by same joints and blendshapes?

[mostly_human]

I need to create two duplicates of my character mesh to facilitate some visual effects.  In the end all three copies will need to have their own material node networks/shading groups.

I tried Duplicate Special with Duplicate Input Connections, but doing it this way I cant put different materials on each copy since they share the same network, this would otherwise appear to work perfectly.

Any other ideas? The key thing is to have all three meshes driven by the same skeleton and ideally changing a blendshape on the original would change it on the other two as well.  Thank you for any help!

[hamsterHamster]

Reset DuplicateSpecial settings, and use Instance option instead. Allows different materials.

[mostly_human]

Dude! So glad it was that easy, thank you so much 🙂

[mostly_human]

Well crap, that actually didnt end up working.  I am needing to have displacement on only the original figure, but despite the 2nd and third mesh having their own materials the displacement from the first mesh is still propagating to the 2nd and third.

[hamsterHamster]

Well, that's much complex then.. it probably can be solved shader-level, like using some sort of shading switches, can't advice there without doing experiments.

Still, another thing to try would be to create any piece of geo, like pCube, delete history, then connect your character mesh shape's outMesh with cube's inMesh, use connection editor. I have no idea about displacement influence there.