A video demonstration of an algorithm for skin deformation from a Siggraph Paper 2011. This looks very interesting and exciting, and probably implemented at Disney. As quoted from youtube link:
"We present a new algorithm for near-interactive simulation of skeleton driven, high resolution elasticity models. Our methodology is used for soft tissue deformation in character animation. The algorithm is based on a novel discretization of corotational elasticity over a hexahedral lattice. Within this framework we enforce positive definiteness of the stiffness matrix to allow efficient quasistatics and dynamics. In addition, we present a multigrid method
that converges with very high efficiency. Our design targets performance through parallelism using a fully vectorized and branch-free SVD algorithm as well as a stable one-point quadrature scheme. Since body collisions, self collisions and soft-constraints are necessary for real-world examples, we present a simple framework for enforcing them. The whole approach is demonstrated in an end-to end production-level character skinning system." Maya 2015 Geodesic Voxel Binding anyone?
Check it out.