Adding colliders to the root/original asset?

Hey there,

I'm new to Unity... I'm used to UE4's method of adding collision to the original or root asset and having it be applied to every instance in the scene but have no idea how this is done inside Unity since there doesn't seem to be an object viewer built into the editor. As far as I can tell in Unity 5, you have to add the colliders to the bones of the individual instances in the hierarchy rather than just once to the original asset. I'd much prefer to add colliders to the root asset as I'm using the skinned mesh more than a dozen times over in the scene and adding colliders to each bone (8 bones per instance) manually would be ridiculous.

I've done a dozen google and youtube searches and no one talks about adding colliders to the bones of a skinned mesh. Any help figuring this out or links to tutorials on this would be greatly appreciated.