This little hidden gem of a command will merge all your selected geometries into one. and maintain the skin weights.
And , with construction history off, it makes a very nice clean result of single orig node, single shape node, and one skin cluster.
polyUniteSkinned -constructionHistory 0 -mergeUVSets 1 ;
Synopsis: polyUniteSkinned [flags] [String...]
Flags:
-e -edit
-q -query
-ch -constructionHistory on|off
-cp -centerPivot
-muv -mergeUVSets Int
-op -objectPivot
Command Type: Command
