[Maya] Getting a multi-mesh character down to one skinned mesh

I've been scratching my head over this one for a while, and after doing it the 'hard' way (which is hopefully not the only way) I'd like to see if I can improve my workflow. Unity's documentation states that skinned meshes should be a single model for performance reasons. In the interest of making my character easier to work with, he is put together from multiple objects (body, gloves, clothing, boots, etc.) and a duplicated copy is merged and exported.

The wall I'm hitting, however, is the best way to go about skinning him. My character's upper clothing in particular contains his body, an undershirt, and a karate gi (three different meshes). I'm currently under the impression that my character is only skinnable after merging all of these meshes into one, and skinning his upper-body after doing so has proven to be bit of a nightmare, where I bend my character one way and have to play whack-a-mole on his gi with verts from lower meshes.

What I'd like to know is if there's some kind of trick either through Maya, or a misunderstanding to correct of my own regarding Unity's preferences, that would allow me to skin my character while retaining the advantages of having him separated into multiple meshes before he's ready to export. There seem to be very few tutorials or guides regarding 'high-poly to game-res' workflows that don't involve a single-meshed, naked human character that needs a couple of edges removed.

Also for the record, I'm aware that I can (and have) remove unseen faces from lower layers, but you'll have to trust me when I say that due to the design, quite a few faces that are 'covered up' can still be visible, and deleting them isn't an option without hurting the visuals.

Thanks!

 

Combining skinned meshes is easy enough, and can be scripted if you want to work on seperates and only export unified mesh data, though you'll need to do some serious brushing up on mel/python to get a push-button solution (or ask nicely in a cg forum).

As ever, Googly knows:
https://www.google.co.uk/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=merging skinned meshes maya&safe=off

(note the proliferation of Unity related results - you're not alone).

 

I believe I understand what you're saying, but if I'm misunderstanding disregard.

My workflow typically when doing this will be to cut and unwrap my UVs as separate meshes. I will then texture them in photoshop and then pull them back into Maya. I save my file like that as separate meshes, but combine them all before export. I'm usually doing a PSD network on my separate meshes anyway, but once I have it as I like it save -> combine -> export.

Hope that helps.