Make instance-like copies from any selected mesh (or meshes).  The cool thing is that you can modify the resulting meshes without affecting any of the other peer or parent "instances".

Also:  Yay! My first Python script.

How to Use

Enter the following text into the python command line or script editor and run it:

import abMakeUnlinkedInstance
abMakeUnlinkedInstance.abMakeUnlinkedInstance()

You can also get argument reference by passing the help argument as true, like so:

abMakeUnlinkedInstance.abMakeUnlinkedInstance(help=True)

Updates

---

11.22.08:   v 1.1 -- New instances now inherit scale in addition to translation and rotation.

12.02.08:   Added ability to select a group null and have all direct child meshes duplicated (nested descendants will be ignored).  Function now works with objects that have no shader.