As riggers, we all know Proximity Wrap is powerful — but unfortunately not exactly rigger-friendly. In many pipelines, skinning joints are driven by controllers or bound to driver joints. This breaks the baking process, since it requires direct transformation of skin joints — something that becomes problematic unless you're using a newer version of Maya with the ROM (Range of Motion) baking feature, which I still find inefficient in many cases.
So I built a tool to streamline the process, broken down into two main phases:
Phase 1 — Setup
- Duplicate both the source and target geometries.
- Rebuild the skinning joint hierarchy.
- Apply a Proximity Wrap to the duplicated target geometry.
Optional tweaks: adjust the wrap falloff or add Delta Mush to improve the deformation match.
Phase 2 — Bake
- Bake the deformations directly into the skin weights on the target geometry.
Performance
In one test, the baking process took over 1 hour 17 minutes on a dense MetaHuman base mesh. Not surprising given the heavy topology, large number of helper joints, and an influence limit set to 30 for maximum quality.
In contrast, on my own rigging system (142 joints, 16,533 vertices), the bake completed in just 20–40 seconds — much more practical for production use.
Limitations (current version)
- Only supports a single joint chain for skinning.
- Planning to lift this restriction in a future update.