Little Maya Cheaters

I've been known at my various places of employment for always looking for ways to cheat. Call it laziness if you like, but I've always believed in working smarter rather than harder. As a result, I'm frequently whipping up little scripts to speed up the workflow of my projects or to save my keyboard from repetitive use damage.

In maya there are a dozen or so core little scripts that I come back to over and over and over again. They just keep finding new ways to be useful. I've shared one or two with my co-workers and friends as the need arose, but I'd never really sat down and organized the lot of them for popular consumption.

Well, that's all changed now. They're free to download and use as you like, but please don't redistribute them.

Here's the overview of what's included:

The Lock / Unlock Set
To lock and unlock nodes in order to prevent their deletion. Very useful for riggers who are handing off files and just know someone will hit delete at the wrong time!

The Rename Set
Some basic renaming functions that are quick and accessible, with the option to rename only same-type objects in a hierarchy.

The Pivot Snapping Set
Snapping / alignment controls that will adhere to an object's pivot point rather
than any external feature. Very useful for making control objects while rigging.

Curve Merge
Collects shape nodes of all the selected nurbs curves under a single transform.

Useful in rigging for applying different effects to different parts of a control object while keeping it functionally a single object.

Null Group
Creates a null group above each of the selected objects which will maintain their orientations while zeroing their values.

Extremely useful in rigging when creating FK control objects

Roll Joint Alignment
Will create a perfectly aligned roll joint from the given bone(s).

Piston Creator
Will create the bones and rigging for a piston. Quickly create tons of pistons on your complicated robotic characters!

Massive Attribute Connector
Will connect the given source and target attributes of all selected nodes, with the final selection being the driver.

Works via text input so that hidden attributes and non-data types are still accessible.

Mirror Set Driven Keys
Finds any driven keys inputting into the selected nodes and attempts to mirror their functionality via name, such as "left" to "right"

Very useful when a large number of driven keys need to be duplicated quickly, as in fingers and toes of rigs.

The Grabby Set
Creates a selection trigger so that one object may be used as a helper to
select many others.

Renaming proof, and easy to strip from a scene if its no longer needed.