Fixing Bone Interpenetration With Skin

This is probably the last major problem with my thesis and I'd really like to get it solved. I started out thinking that I could solve it with sculpt deformers, but after playing around with them once again, I realized their limitations and decided it wasn't worth pursuing. After that, I thought I would find the closest distance from each vector to a face on the bone along its normal and maintain that as a minimum distance. After getting this function to work with a simple plane and locator, I realized that this wouldn't work because most vertex normals don't intersect with the bone at all. If there were muscle filling out the rest of the mass, this technique would probably work, but then, I dropped the due to a whole other range of problems. Now I'm trying a technique where I find the closest distance from each vertex to a point on the bone and maintain that as a minimum distance. To do this, I measure the distance to that point before and after deformation, if the distance has decreased, I push the vertex out along its normal by an amount determined with the sine rule, such that the distance between the two points becomes correct. Unfortunately, while this all sounds like it should work, I'm getting poor results (see below). I think it might help if I find the shortest distance to a face on the bone (although computationally, much more expensive) so I'm working on a function to do that.