Maya - How to clean combine mesh history?

Question

I've combined a load of meshes using Mesh > Combine. Each mesh was already skinned to my rig. The combine worked ok and the rig / skinning is fine. However I'm left with a bunch of transform nodes:

If I delete history on the newly combined object these nodes are deleted but the skin becomes unbound. If I delete them manually the skin also becomes unbound and the materials disappear from the model. If I export (to Unity) all of these transforms are included, even if I just export a selection of the skeleton & mesh.

How can I get rid of these transform nodes and keep my skinned rig? I've searched online & in the help files and have tried various things for two days now without success.

I'm using Maya LT 2016 SP 4 Ext 3.

Many thanks

Answer 1

You need to do a selective history wipe. Take a look in one of the node editor (Or hypergraph or hypershade by preference or for older mayas) and graph the history of your object. You should be able to locate merge node(s). If your lucky this goes directly to your shape node or a tweak node. If not you need to create one and connect the merge to in mesh of merges and into rest of your history. Then delete the in history of that container and you should be free to delete the transforms and merge nodes.

Now it is very hard to be specific as I am not in front of your maya and can not see your total history. I admit that this is a bit involved.

A second thing that you may try instead of the wipe, is marking the transforms as intermediate nodes this should hide them from the outliner. Most probably your exporter will also ignore these nodes as part of unbaked history, but you never know Im not so knowledgeable about the unity exporter importer chain. Now that i think of it, this might be the easiest option.

And finally a third option. Detach your bones from the history and bake the weights down. Then delete history and reattach the bones. There are quite many tools to do this floating around as its one of those basic tricks for many rig builders. But obviously if you had some other animation nodes than just bones you would lose those. But again this might be easier than the history wipe altough it is also somewhat involved.