Bake deformers on a character

You can bake deformers onto a character to approximate the deformations for game engines with limited deformer support.

To bake a character's deformers

1. Enter BakeDeformerTool in the Maya Command line. The Bake Deformer Tool window appears.
2. Right-click the top of the character's hierarchy (for example, the hips) and choose Select Hierarchy from the contextual menu. The entire character skeleton is selected.
3. Shift-select the Character mesh.
   

   Select both the skeleton and the mesh

4. Click Source in the Bake Deformer Tool window to add your character's properties to the Source fields.
5. Now, do the same for the destination character. (Right-click the hips joint, choose Select Hierarchy and then Shift-select the mesh.)
6. Click Destination in the Bake Deformer Tool window to add your character's properties to the Destination fields.
7. Click Apply. The Source Character performs a series of quick transformations to calculate the deformer weighting.
   

You can verify that the deformers have been converted to cluster deformers by comparing the two characters in the Attribute Editor; the destination character will have no deformer tabs except for a skin cluster.