Maya - Merge NURBS Curves Tutorial

A quick and easy way to combine multiple NURBS Curves into one object. Let me know what other things you want to see a tutorial on.

[@yuuneeq9494]

Maya's process for making a simple square has the same energy as Carl Sagan telling you to make an entire universe at the beginning of a pie recipe.

[@zaschawashington]

HI THIS IS THE BEST MAYA TUTORIAL I EVER SEEN SO FAR. It was short straight forward, and you described what you did. LOVE IT! THANKS.

[@HazaChillzOut]

That was perfectly straight forward. Well done.

[@HunterHungry]

thanks for your tutorial

[@jessfreemandesign]

Thanks so much for this! I'm learning rigging and this is super helpful for cleaning up my controllers 😊

[@jeffyart4410]

I learned this in my rigging class and I lost the notes.
Thank you SO much for posting this. :)

[@averageanthony279]

Happy to help!

[@chidede]

Makes no sense why Maya still doesn't have a simple tool to click on for this. After all these years....

[@mordicai4296]

This was exactly what I was looking for, thanks dude!

[@QaziTV]

Thank you so much! I’ve wondered how to do this for ages!

[@vladatmm]

Thank you

[@Ausboss1]

Still works in 2022. Thank you!

[@prasadsanas2879]

Thank you need more video like this

[@dhrutiprasad1791]

Thank you sir that saves my day

[@iamyaizv134]

That helped me a lot!! Thank u so much!

[@AndreyZotov]

Thanks! Very useful.

[@pandapanda5172]

This is so helpful!! Thank you!!

[@ily2739]

great stuff thank you!!!!!!

[@felipecea2523]

Great tip thanks!

[@aristotska6391]

is there any screen to create automatically ? maya is dumb when it comes to this

[@mordecai1484]

Today I realized that Maya curve tool is super weak. I created a curve without closing it. then I mirrored it across axes and combined both curves. I now have curve with 2 pair of end points which I want to connect to each other and it's impossible to do it.

[@basemshenouda9980]

Great video , But how do I do the opposite XD ?
I have curves combined and I want to separate .
Thanks .

[@williammacnamara773]

awesome tute, easy sub

[@prashantkambali]

Thank you so much. but how to unparent again?

[@andreap9319]

THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOUU

[@412music]

Thanks for the video...but the curves I merged are still detached to each other 😭

[@arturperzyna5453]

Thanks xD!

[@jeangannett]

Thanks!!!!

[@jeangannett]

Would you mind explaining what the -r and -s do? It worked for me, I am just curious so I know what's going on!

[@averageanthony279]

I'm not an expert at MEL by any stretch, and I don't understand fully what's going on, but here's how I understand it.
Firstly the command "parent". Fairly self explanatory, it's basically telling everything that's highlighted to parent. The "-r" and "-s" is essentially the criteria for how it parents the objects together.
-r (-relative) tells all objects to keep their transformations relative to the parent (the null1 group in this instance). This is why it's important to freeze the transformations beforehand, or you'll have curves in the wrong positions, as they'll apply their own transformations relative to the position of the parent (i.e if a curve has a Translate Y value of 1, and everything else is 0, the curve will be 1 higher than the parent group when parenting, with the parent group probably being at the centre of the grid, with translate and rotate values at 0 and scale values at 1.)
-s (-shape) tells Maya to parent all shapes under a single shape. When you go to the Outliner and select "Display -> Shapes", you're allowing the Shape Nodes to be viewed in the Outliner (they are the children of the Transform Nodes, and are named *objectname*Shape1 in the outliner.) Without the -s, Maya will essentially just group the Transform Nodes together under the null1 group, whereas -s tells Maya to take the Shape Nodes from the curves and parent them under the Null1 group instead; the empty groups we delete afterwards are the now-defunct Transform Nodes. This one is quite hard to explain, so the easiest way to understand is to open a New Scene, create some curves to group, freeze the transformations, select the Shape Nodes and finally the null1 group, and type "parent -r", leaving out the "-s" command, and play around with the results.
Hope this helps!!

[@siyili8117]

@@averageanthony279 thank you so much! that helps a lot to understand!

[@victorarriojas9390]

thanks

[@mordicai4296]

The Maya docs are really shitty, it's up to us to teach each other new tricks.

[@SethMeshko3DAnimationArtist]

Script!
selection = cmds.ls(selection = True)
print(selection)
selection = selection
newTransform = cmds.group(empty = True, world = True, name = 'temp_null')
selectionLength = len(selection)
if selectionLength >= 2:
for eachCurve in selection:
cmds.makeIdentity(eachCurve, apply = True, translate = True, rotate = True, scale = True)
shapeNode = cmds.listRelatives(eachCurve, children = True, shapes = True)
print(shapeNode)
cmds.parent(shapeNode, newTransform, shape = True, relative = True)
else:
print('Select at least two curves to combine')