Syflex is a powerful cloth simulator that can be used to simulate skin and flesh sySkin, syFlesh.

Chosen by the industry by big name studios it has developed a good name for itself being used in production on films such as 10,00BC, Happy Feet and the latest Horton Hears a WHo

Syflex is widely supported across platforms availible for XSI Maya Houdini and Lightwave. Availible from their website to download as a extrenal plugin it has been included in XSI Since Version 5.0

The process includes creating a cloth, a set of particles linked by springs. The stiffnesses of the springs and the masses of the particles define the properties of the cloth. These can control the stretch (elasticity), bending and shearing (sliding)

The system is picky and complicated, it provides no presets and provides little to no documentation or tutorials. Attention to details such as its dislike for triangles make it hard to use with many results gained relying on trial and error.

A cloth can take 3 different forms: cloth, skin and flesh.
They all share the same surface properties.

The setup illustrated above shows the standard cloth that allows for the resize property, causing the skin to shrink around the muscles however there are two other feature that users should be aware of that i did not manage to fully test within the time limit.

Using SySkin

A skin is a multi-layer cloth. The surface of each layer has the same properties as a standard cloth (stretch, shear and bend). Each layer is connected to other layers by springs.

It can model a very stiff and heavy cloth and human skin. Using two layers, the inner to the bones. The outter layer is the real skin. The springs between the two layers will allow the outer surface to slide over the inner surface. The latest can be used to attach the skin to many muscles.

Using SyFlesh

On a closed surface (ex: sphere, torus), a flesh adds vertices inside the object, to help keep its volume.
It can be used to model a layer of fat around a body.

Syflex provides very realistic results that are acurate however it requires a large amount of computer processing solving slowly it is impractical for slower systems. Render times are high and inflate in relation to the density of the mesh.