SHAREABLE ARM PUPPET

Suggestion 1, slightly tongue in cheek, rerig each time - I bet you get fast at it after a while, and then you can have different length arms etc!

Suggestion 2, what you can do is “export puppet” from the menu, then “import puppet”. This makes a full copy of the artwork and rigging. If you just duplicate the puppet in CH it does not duplicate everything (artwork file is shared). That is, export a puppet you like, import it, start editing. When you edit you will be editing a copy.

However, the negative of this is the puppet root will be the same each time. E.g. “+Chloe” is the root layer name for the Chloe sample puppet. As soon as you rename the root puppet I fear it will lose the rigging. (This is in general true with any layer renaming.) Having lots of puppets with the same name might get a little confusing (?).

I don’t think you can copy and paste rigging between puppets, but I have not tried recently!

Suggestion 3 is a variation of suggestion 2. Duplicate the puppet in CH then click on the puppet in the project panel. The properties panel will show the path name to the artwork file. You can change this property and that puppet will then use the new file instead. I would experiment with this - if all the layers are named IDENTICALLY, then I think it SHOULD keep the rigging. It loses rigging because layer names change, so it is not sure what is what. 

But the root layer being the puppet character name seems the biggest problem. If you rename the puppet, I fear all manual rigging will be lost. That is why I try to use as much autorigging as possible (e.g. get layer names right for eyes and mouth parts to reduce manual tagging). For me personally, I just rerig the puppet each time. Having said that, I don’t actually create full new puppets very often! Lol!