I managed to get it done by rigging up a lot of vines, I am ashamed to say the solution was pretty simple. Rig, skin then use the IK-Spline handle tool to attach them to the curves on the arms then you can scale the vines along those curves by keying the joint scale as long as it is kept uniform. Can also animate the IK…
You're baking the mesh object with the deformer directly? or are you creating several copies of the deformed object along the curve and using those as blendshape targets? Other ways of approaching it: rig the vines to a series of joints, can be chain or share same parent joint, motion path them to the curves on the arm.…