Progressive skin - the future of character creation

[Morbid Angel]

The other day I was thinking on the way to work:
Today everything is going physical... Everyone is trying to reproduce realworld, in eather the rendering, the motion or modeling. Maxwell is a good example, physics based renderer where you can set true world physics properties of shader and etc. Max's reactor engine which fantasticly simulates cloth, rigids and etc. Motion captures of human actions/behavior expressions and etc. Technology has really progressed for the last 5 years.
But, where does modeling stand today? same place it was 5 years ago. The basics of creating models are the same. Build the cage, smooth it, make sure it works, build in wrinckles creases etc, then paint your zbrush maps displace your model and go onto rigging. The model ends up limited to what it has been prebuild to. (and takes long time to do)

But I belive that this is not the future way. I think as others, modeling will also go physics based. For example:
You model your base cage, then go into every crease, fold anywhere where there is skin wrinckles and code the physical properties of human (or any skin) so that when there is transformation the program calculates based on true physics the amount of skin folds, wrinckles (based on musculars or whatever) and performs the creases, folds and other physical motions. The progressive skin will then behave like meta mesh or fluid mesh, where it will change and adopt to required amount of creases in a particular area.
I know this is not simple thing, and probably today it is not possible. But down the road 10-20 years from now it will be.
Just thought I share my thoughs with you guys.
Let me know what you think.

[jujubee]

Sounds like an advanced shader with built-in displacements characterized by additional paramaters such as rigidness and a variety of creasing patterns. I don't know about 'true' physics as nothing in the 3D world can ever be physically characterized by 'true' other than the fact that photons are mimicked on your monitor.

[Da_elf]

isnt there something called ACT out there which allows you to create your bone structure then add muscles and the skin is then generated from that. kinda like the oooold metareyes plugin i guess. i would assume you would build on this sort of model which would detect where skin would bunch when bending sometimes an area would bend or fold or shift a certain amount before bunching or wrinkleing would begin. also having internal muscle and bone structures would facilitate animating easier since the internal bone structure would be whats animated (possibly link a CS skeleton to the modeling skeleton if CS is your method of animation. and then the bones drive the muscles which drive the skin then cerain wrinkle weights can be applied to joins which would specify at what point that area would start to wrinkle. this also brings you closer to realism when bringing in cerain things like 3s. if you did a human mesh and applies a nice 3d material to it sure the ears and thin areas would look nice. but put a really reall yhigh powered light behind the character..ooooo. lets say an atomic explosion hehe and voila. you can see right though the character even though there should be internal things like the bones and muscles that would prevent it a bit. ok. enough rambling from me.

[Adam H. Stewart]

ACT is a waste of time

Act is a waste of time - well of my time anyway I don't want to put it down - OK I want to put it down. I was trying the simplest of rigs and it failed everytime. Tech support was non existent - but in theory it looked good. I am more interested (and experimenting with) CAT's new skin. I am growing to love the bone system and the skin seems equally as interesting. I am so much more in favour of bones that you can use to represent geom, rather then hard to see sketched lines and hard to grab IK goals. That is where I think the future is at.

[Morbid Angel]

I also thought the other day...what if a mesh could be an entity?.. then its polyshape can be physicly not present in 3d world but have all physics properties and limitless polycounts.