I've been thinking about skin for a while and come up with one, slightly, odd, idea to mass produce skin.
I've always been amazed by that NASA flexible metal chain mail that can be 3D printed.
https://www.wired.com/story/nasa-fabric-chain-mail-from-the-future/
As I was looking at the resolution of some of the 3D resin printers I realized the resolution on these things is super high. I think even the the lower level ones are high enough resolution that you could 3D print "molds" for these chain mail structures with reasonably fine detail. Look at the above link and then imagine putting down individual layers. You would have to have thin mask and then squeegee on the material in layers, but the printer could make structures small enough to be a fairly good skin.
So here I have some data on printer minimum printing spec,
>>31727
Even a cheap one can get
XY Resolution (7680*4320)
0.0285mm
So let's say to be safe we make a minimum line width of three times resolution we get
0.0855mm
and if to get good definition on the little loops on the back side we make 50 divisions of this dimension we get
4.275mm across the whole of "skin" structure. I expect you could do better with some practice but 4mm is not bad.
Ideally I think 1mm or 0.5mm would be perfect. The effect would be like little pores in the skin made of beads 1mm or less across. There are printers capable of doing these but at a higher cost than this cheap one. In fact you could do some maybe 5mm or so with a standard filament printer I think without too much trouble. So you print squares (actually hexagons or octagons would look better) of this in "negative" then make molds from those, which in turn makes the skin in layers. The molds would be slices. So there would be positive molds where plastic glue and matrix is deposited, and negative where you have some sort of washable materials. Could be crisco vegetable grease, PVA, possibly sugar, maybe wheat flour in water, anything that can be washed out. The large majority of these would be the same. So you mass produce the molds from your printed master and join them end to end. The only deviation would be you would need to have angles on the ends. So maybe you could print a lot of tiny squares with various angles. Join them to the sides of the larger pieces. Now you have a big ass flat mold that you can work with. When the skin is fully screen printed each layer at a time.Wash out the negative areas and dry. You now have a perfectly flexible, but strong and rigid, skin made of plastic. Easy to take care of and since you are laying these down in layers you could make the outer layer any color you want. In fact with a stencil over the outer layer you could have different colors that would in effect be like painting the outside (or screen printing t-shirts), but without all the labor. Other effects you could get by layering different colors. So white with a red underneath would get you a pink. Each layer changing the color. Take some experimenting but once you had it figured and the stencils made it would be the same for each one.
So how to hold this on? Notice the inter-lapping rings. The end pieces could have open rings and you could thread a string through them and pull them together. And for cavities, notice how the rings are, remind you of something??? Velcro! So the lock part of Velcro could be used to "hook" onto the chain mail rings.
Other ideas are to use contrast to fool the eye. So you make the body parts witrh alrger hhexagons and the hands, face or ecposed skin parts from smaller ones. The contrast would make the smaller skin parts look more like skin. I also thnk this sort of covering would lower normies negative uncanny valley response. it would clearly be a robot but all the important exposed skin parts would be soft due to the fineness of the flexible chain mail.
I'm going to comment and see if
I can get NoidoDev to see if the AI can simulate some of this chain mail shin.
One more idea I really liked some of the yarn covered girls he made. I bet you could make the outer shell of the chain mail such that you could get some sort of yarnish or other textured material. The rough edges would likely cancel out (hide) the intersecting grid lines from our perspective. Making it look more organic, but still a robot.Could be really interesting.
If you type in "3d printed chainmail" in a search engine and look at the images it brings up there's a ton of different ways to make these and you could even vary the technique over different body parts.