Plugins + Scripts Procedural Wrinkles

Procedural Wrinkles
A complete, fully procedural skin-wrinkle system driven by the character's actual geometry.

Fully procedural by design
To my knowledge, Procedural Wrinkles is VaM's first system of its kind, combining compression-generated folds, an automatic neutral reference and independent face and body regions. I know of no direct equivalent to this approach in VaM.
The system measures local skin compression and generates the position, direction and strength of folds at runtime. Expressions and poses become visible surface detail as the skin compresses, and folds relax as that compression eases. The response comes from the geometry itself, independently of morph names, animation clips or hand-painted wrinkle masks.

Effects and controls

• Automatic neutral reference: enable the plugin during a scene without first setting a neutral pose.
• Six configurable regions: Face, Neck, Torso, Arms, Hands and Legs have independent controls.
• Adjustable fold generation: tune overall strength, selectivity, compression thresholds and fold spacing.
• Smooth response: control how quickly folds appear and relax through Attack and Release.
• Skin shading integration: generated folds blend into normal maps and respond to scene lighting.
• Selective activation: Face starts enabled; choose the additional regions your scene needs.

Performance and optimization
I pushed optimization as far as I could, fighting for fractions of a millisecond throughout development.

• Local changes trigger compression calculations for affected triangles, while unchanged results are reused.
• Smoothing work focuses on vertices still transitioning.
• Texture work is skipped when the rendered result has not meaningfully changed.
• When generation is disabled and remaining folds finish fading, geometry and rendering work shuts down and generated resources are released.

Profiling and repeated refinement shaped the implementation, including its handling of both static scenes and changing geometry.

Part of one unified system
This plugin is part of my unified procedural system for VaM. The four components share the same focus: effects generated at runtime, responsive behavior and carefully optimized performance.

• Procedural Mascara: evolving mascara, tears and contact smearing.
• Procedural Saliva: attached liquid strands that form, stretch, merge and break.
• Procedural Wrinkles: skin folds driven by local compression.
• Procedural Slaps: contact-based redness, irritation and accumulated pain.

Each component can be used individually or combined with the others as part of the same system.

Compatibility in my testing
Within the scope of my testing, I have not encountered conflicts between these plugins or with the other plugins used in my scenes. This reflects the combinations and versions I have tested.