A thought for later regarding merging skin parts

During my Dreamworks interview, I was asking about the crazy smears that some of their rigs allowed. Apparently, they avoid the meshes breaking down by turning them into a sort of springy mesh that they can then relax to get more evenly spaced out vertices after stretching and the like. This may be something to look at, in addition to various smoothing techniques, when I come to the problem of merging all the skin mesh parts into a full creature.