If Bill ever thought his first skin shader sortie was less than awesome, I'd like to provide some evidence to the contrary:

Whilst I'm doing what I can to understand shaders, nodes... the whole complex mathematically-saturated technology... I still want to do art, and use this beautiful know-how in a sentence. So, I do. I'm creating hair textures, like the one above... on a character I'm putting together... what incredible skin this shader creates on such a rubbish textureMap!

The reason I chose the older shader - the one that first came out with VSS, arguably one of the most incredible freebies ever offered in the history of Poserdom - was because it still allowed some of the make-up textures to show through, which opened my product to those who couldn't take advantage of nodes and shaders: Daz Studio users.

I have been playing with this shader... a LOT. The problem is I have but a very scant of frame of reference to work from. It's a little bit like programming in Visual Basic... you look at other people's code, and you think: "Gee, I would never thought to use that function to do that!" At least there is something in terms of documentation to refer to for VB: for this, there's really very little. Just your own observations, what titbits you can glean from the Node Cult threads and from what has been kinda discussed here.

So, my objective is to completely understand what Bill was doing here with this 23-node marvel. I'm a long way from getting it: right now, just the PoserSurface node is still filled with all sorts of interesting characteristics that demand a relatively clear understanding. That there is a sophisticated formula running in the background of the Diffuse_Color channel... and that if you're going to use the Alternate_diffuse channel, you can actually leave the Diffuse_Value set at 1 if you plug in a Math_function Add node which does nothing. There's a gazillion little aspects of nodes to discover.

Which makes this shader (only 23 nodes, but what a wonder they produce!) even more spectacular.

I'll get to that 55+-node leviathan at some point in the future. Once I get my head around this one!

Okay, back to it. Head-down, bum-up....

Monterey/Mint21.x/Win10 - Blender3.x - PP11.3(cm) - Musescore3.6.2

Wir sind gewohnt, daß die Menschen verhöhnen was sie nicht verstehen
[it is clear that humans have contempt for that which they do not understand] 

Metaphor of Chooks