Using Cloth Simulation and Delta Mush Deformer for Skin Collision in Animation
I'd like to present the results of a study I conducted recently:
Story
Working on the animated short film I am constantly updating a list of tasks to do in order to achieve a descent final result. One particular topic took my sleep away recently when I remembered that in order to correct skinning errors on animated characters you'd either have to sculpt and then script a bunch of blend shapes or would need a muscle system available in your DCC software.
I then turned to Maya, which has had a muscle system for ages.
Maya Muscle system
Maya provides several deformers to manage soft- and hard-tissue interaction between muscles like smart-, self- and multi-object collisions. Even though they aren't terribly performant, they get the job done.
Unfortunately as soon as I would've used any of Maya's Muscle system tools I'd be tied down to a 185$ a month subscription plan for the whole duration of the project which would be outrageous. There is a lite-version of Maya available for indie gamedevs - Maya LT - which only costs 30$ a month, but it doesn't come with the Muscle system.
Hence I had to improvise and develop a simple and straightforward solution for this problem in a DCC of my choice.