Maya 2009: combining geo w/o affecting pivot

killingpeople

Whenever combining geo, the pivot is automatically centered to the newly created bounding area of the adjoined geo. I'd like the geo being combined, or attached, to the parent, to adopt the parent's pivot.

Thanks lover

Firebert

Combining or parenting? Combining will make one mesh, parenting will make one mesh selection based off the selection of the parent while still maintaining the ability to select the meshes within the parent group without having to separate.
If you select them all together with the last selection becoming the parent and hit "P", you will be able to use the pivot of the parent and still transform all your objects at once. Now, you may get some funky issues transforms like rotate for instance. Don't use this too often, so I've never made the full effort to find out why that is. Gotta have something to do with the pivot points and transforms of the children in the parent group.

or per usual, i may be completely wrong........ nothing new there

killingpeople

I'd like to combine elements to others without having to readjust the pivot every time.

Progg

Yeah I was going to say parent is really the only way to save the pivot point of the original mesh. Unless you wrote a .mel script that combines and then centers the pivot point at the centerpoint of the original mesh.

MoP

Yeah, I wrote a script at work which does this (it's not too hard) because it was driving me mad too, I'll see if I can dig it up or rewrite it and release it.

Progg

I was going to say.. Mop is going to come in here and save the day. But I didn't... Damn I would have been hailed a psychic.

killingpeople

That'd be cool, thx MoP.

greuh

I am using the flattenCombine mel script exclusively for a couple of years already. Never ever use the native combine of Maya, I still can't begin to guess why they left it like it is.
This script was posted on the area a while back here: http://area.autodesk.com/downloads/scripts/flattencombinemel

but I am sure there's a bunch of different versions on creativecrash.com depending what you really want it to do.