Unnecessary geometry

I have come to the conclusion that, unless the animator specifically wants to have the character remove his clothing, the geometry that lies underneath the clothing is a bit superfluous. No matter how well you paint the weights, there will always be penetration because the skin will be affected from a different location and move at a different angle than the clothing. It can be done but would be a huge waste of time if the character's clothes are always on. So, if I get the ok, I'm going to plan to delete most of the underlying skin geometry.

A Heavy Rig

These ideas are sounding great and really difficult. It would be awesome if you could figure out a way to get the cloth to react to the movement in the same way as the concept, but what is most interesting to me is the way I'll be able to animate his weight.

In classes here, we've mostly been using the Morpheus rig, and he's a little limited as far as heavy characters go. Some problems we've run into were treating the fat as an elastic substance, rather than a solid. For example, when he is resting on his belly, his body is held a foot off the ground because there is this giant solid mass in the way.

Even if we can't work around that, it would be amazing to have a controllable gut that we could move around and emphasize the weight of the character during movement.

We've never had a weighty rig, and it would be amazing to get to animate that kind of weight shift. Looking forward to an excellent rig :)