after a while of tweaking, i discovered that the gelato exporter for blender does not handle materials well at all.  if you want to try it i would recomend adding the shader link you want for each material, then going into the file yourself and editing the parimiters- one of the major bugs is that after changing a parimiter in the plugin for a shader it jumps to another material.  nothing important is messed up,  its just realy annoying.  clicking on the material you want to view also does not show the correct material.  

after some playing around i figured out how to use an SSS shader (not supported well from the plugin).  it requires some basic editing of the file.  basicaly, what i ended up doing was writing a .bat file and coppying the exported file and calling it something different.  after that i changed the shader in the new file of material with sss to be the same as that seen in the example subsurface file.

most materials work fine with the plugin,  its only materials that access the shadowmap that are not supported yet.  i using sliders instead of inputs would also make this plugin nicer.  i will write a tutorial for using sss in gelato from blender eventualy (possibly this weekend!)