Since he seems to not like to do it himself, I am going to plug face_off's skin scripts. I highly suggest getting your hands on them! I went through the tutorial above, and I understood it well enough to do a pretty decent render or two. Then I decided I would just buy the script, and see if it would help me do it better. I was very impressed. You can tweak the nodes after the script does its work, but it saves so much time and effort in the setup, it is more than worth the price.