Plugins [Experimental] Cloth Skin

This plugin replaces a female model's skin with a sim cloth geoshell . The intent is to add a bit of additional 'softness' models.

The effect... not great. VAM cloth physics aren't really suited for this, and can be hard to work with. I've played around with various settings for a while and I don't think I can make it much better without tweaking the cloth physics implementation.

In the meantime, I figure people might want to play around with the concept, or cannibalize some of the code.



















Usage

1. Add to a female model
2. Tweak physics or material settings from the Cloth menu.
   1. Look for "ClothSkinGeoshell"
3. There's a plugin UI button to re-sync the skin materials if you want to change them.

It should be compatible with @CheesyFX 's ShakeIt mod and you can (and should!) try them together.
The cloth skin otherwise tends to behave like an empty shell (which it is), and I found that ShakeIt gives it more depth. It also makes it easier to balance the cloth physics between 'jiggliness' and collision.


Notes

1. VAM's cloth physics have a tendency to let colliders slip through the fabric, especially small colliders like fingers.
   1. I'm going to play around with this more. I think the right sequence of compute shaders might work a bit better...
2. Cloth doesn't cover hands, feet, gens, or ears.
   1. Figured they're less important and it's a big sim as-is.
3. Self-Collision is currently only supported for the hands.
   1. I can't enable collision for other parts of the body (except maybe feet) or the skin's collider list is 'all or nothing'.
4. The genital region is a separate mesh and I haven't made it soft. This means that the surrounding area is rigid and there's a visible seam in some cases.
5. Might have issues with other transparent clothing. Changing the renderQueues around usually fixes it.

Dev Notes

This plugin fundamentally consists of three things..

• A sim-enabled geoshell with some basic sim textures
• Some semantics for syncing skin textures with the geoshell's textures
• Logic to ignore the body's colliders (but not others) for the cloth sim
  • This was the trickier part

The internal mechanics aren't particularly complex, so if anyone wants to build on top of it feel free to ping me and I'll share what I've figured out.

Splitting the Cloth
A number of people asked this, and splitting the mesh into multiple is technically possible but would take a lot of work to look good. The issue is that I haven't found a way to get VAM to wrap a geoshell pefrectly so there will be visible seams. A good example of this is the genital area on the current model.

That being said, the cloth wrapping process isn't terribly complicated so maybe I can write my own that can do vertex-to-vertex mapping for geoshells? TBD.

The seams between parts would also need to be rigid or they'll become misaligned. VAM's physics can treat 'rigid' and 'almost rigid' noticeably differently so that might take massaging as well.