Testing the new SSS and texture paint tools in 2.67 - Some alien plant/life form.
Interesting design and great work! Could you do some close-ups showing the detail better or a higher resolution render? It seems interesting… 
Pretty nice! I have one thing to say though: It looks really plastic-y, maybe that was what you were going for but I just wanted to say since you described it as a plant a.k.a. something organic. Does that make sense? Great work though!
I have attached my node setup for depth based colour change and this is it. It’s slightly more complex and takes longer to converge on complex meshes but it’s worthwhile. 
Depth Based Colour Test.blend (709 KB)
So earlier I noticed that the specularity on my awesome Lee Perry wasn’t awesome at all because the specularity map didn’t do a single thing in terms of creating any sort of glossiness. Maybe I don’t understand what specularity maps are for but I’m pretty sure they are to do with glossy reflections if not then tell me so that I may add to my repertoire of knowledge. To solve this I used a combination of two layer weight nodes and did it by eye referencing a render done in modo since I couldn’t find the real Lee Perry references (if you know then I’d be grateful if you could show me). The final result looks crazy smooth but that’s because the displacement stuff doesn’t really work well… I’m really bad with technical words… I downloaded a new copy from blendswap just to see if it was a problem with my copy, it wasn’t. In the past half hour I’ve been trying to get a realistic result (which is impossible considering reality has ambient lighting that changes) and this is so far what I’ve gotten and I’m going to see if using an environment map of a living room will help. Wish me luck! 
Thank you, I like your sss shader very much.
A quick test on a zbrush dynamesh study I’ve started …only 300 samples cycles. Renders blazing fast.
cheers !
-R
Attachments
Really awesome node setup. Thanks for sharing
Amazing render, working on a very good level, keep it
Guys, if you post your work with this shader or at least credit it here I’d be grateful because then I can see how well it’s working and find any bugs with the setup. I’m thinking of what more I can do but for now the latest is the latest one I posted.
Some small corrections, re-organisation for ease of use, separate parameters for absorption glass and subsurface scattering and it also includes depth based falloff group node as well (this is very useful with a color ramp 
).
Enjoy guys!
SSS_Base_Material_Final.blend (722 KB)
Wow, Partin, your piglet looks amazing. I am looking forward to a roasted version.
Hey Microno,
Thanks a bunch on this great gem! I found this thread only last night. Coincided with a new dyntopo sculpt to test it on 
No textures as of yet, just your shader.
Partin, the piglet looks amazing!
Got around to lay some basic textures, still the dyntopo mesh. Your shader looks great thanks! 
I tried to create a simple SSS shader that emulated the already existent one. This is how far I got, I feel exhausted now having spent an entire day experimenting and trying to do this. Quite frustrating BUT I finally got something worthwhile! 
Here ya go!
Simple SSS_2.zip (167 KB)
Microno,
your “shader” looks like an addon(?)…I mean it has a gui with
way more parameters than the one that comes with 2.68a.
I’m just tweeking the settings to see what they do…don’t really know
what I’m doing yet…is it just trial & error?
I need to switch to my CUDA machine though, as it’s fairly slow on my ASUS i7 laptop.
Is the SSS built into 2.68a supposed to be better somehow? It seems pretty limited
even if you use the Mixed, e.g. SSS + Glossy.
Your shader seems to offer much more control.
Thanks so much for sharing the SSS shader and your knowledge.
I can’t wait to get home to try this out. Even with the native SSS, your shader is exciting.
I’m frustrated with the CPU limitation on the SSS shader node. I assembled a rig with the top-shelf cpu (k3960 @ 4.7) and gpu (Titan 6GB). CUDA renders are still 4 times faster. And I could add two more Titans to the box… money permitting. I’d need to set up a farm to expand CPU power.
I play so many tricks to composite-in low-rendered and cleaned SSS renders. The trick’s I’ll have to play to use this will be child’s play.