I am rigging a bird and all my wing feathers are linked duplicates with the same mesh data. I would like to keep the objects linked in case I want to change the shape of the feathers later.
My problem is that if I weight paint one feather to the rig, all feathers are connected to the same bone, since they share their mesh data and vertex groups. Is it possible to unlink the vertex groups, or somehow weight paint them individually, while still keeping the shape of the mesh linked?