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. Select Skin > Bake Deformation to Skin Weights. 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.
   Note: If you add multiple skin clusters to the destination mesh, a dialog appears asking you if you want to create another. This is to prevent accidentally overwriting the first skin cluster.
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.
Note:

A progress bar in the Help Line lets you track the Bake process. The speed of the Bake process varies depending on many factors. You will see a warning if there is not enough memory to complete the solve and you can press Escape to cancel the process at any time.