Method for creating facial skin folds using nCloth

[dkrelina]

Hey, I am trying to develop a process for generating facial skin folds using nCloth. I have a scene with a simple head geo object.

I created a simple blendshape animation of the face smiling. See it here:

https://streamable.com/apqsi

I am using this blendshape animation as a collider to "drive" an nCloth object and to create skin folds. The nCloth object has similar topology, but with a few extra subdivision levels. Here is the nCloth object draped over the blendshape geo.

Here is a playblast of the nCloth object interacting with the smile animation:

https://streamable.com/1giv7

I am causing the nCloth to stick to the blendshape by painting the weight of the Stickiness attribute. The areas around the eyes and mouth are more sticky. This is the painted stickiness map on the blenshape geo.

I'm interested in continuing to develop this technique. I really like the organic feeling of the folds and unpredictability of resulting expressions. The skin folds look really nice from all directions. This side view looks good too:

https://streamable.com/bk1gd

I'm running into a few issues though...

1. How do I get rid of the hard edges caused by the collider geo?

I want to find a way to smooth these edges. Is it better to tweak the nCloth collision settings (ex. collision thickness) or increase subdivisions on the collision object (making it more smooth)? Or perhaps there is another approach?

2. How do I prevent the nCloth object from "unsticking" when the mouth is smiling?

Have a look at the video:

https://streamable.com/1giv7

You can see that the nCloth starts to detach from the collider at the end of the movement. I'd like to get it to look a bit more realistic and have it "feel" more like real skin, less like thin plastic stuck to another object.

3. How do I give the skin an overall more smooth look? In my tests it looks too jagged, glitchy and wrinkly.

In this video I tried changing the nCloth settings to a "Water Balloon" preset. I like how the skin feels more smooth and I like how the glitches are less obvious, but I don't want the droopy chin and I'm not sure which nCloth settings are responsible for this.

https://streamable.com/ayw7j

I could really use a few words from an nCloth guru. Looking forward to any thoughts or suggestions on alternate workflows 🙂