jamesj
Thank you! That's the clarification I was looking for.
The reason I asked was it seems like my skeleton rig in Maya was performing faster if I skinned the entire skeleton mesh as one whole object rather than skinning the major bones individually (45fps vs 20fps). I wouldn't include the rig in my ziva scene, but when I cache out the skeleton I would be left with one whole skeleton object.
I'll try constraining my skeleton geo (spine and ribcage would need skinning) to my rig joints and that might get me the performance I'm looking for.