Hi IS,

Ok, I managed to build the shader just like you said up to the AO/GC part, so I'm not ready to post renders.  I did it with V4 and her simple face map.

It's pretty easy to follow, and from my standpoint, is a great learning experience.  I'm glad BB is here to help us understand it too.

It's fascinating how you build the SSS, sheen, and displacement map right from the color map.

A couple of non-technical things about the tutorial, quite picky actually, but did have me guessing some. 

I liked the way that when I followed the tut, word for word, my nodes were named exactly the same as your nodes, even after copying in the massive stack of fresnel math nodes.  In your shader there is no Blender_3.  Maybe it was deleted?  Your Blender_4 became my Blender_3 and once I got to the point where I was hooking everything up, it started making my eyes spin.

On the page where we're plugging in all the nodes (page 6 perhaps?), you say to plug sheen into the alt spec channel.  I think that was blender_2, but I'm not positive.  Probably could be corrected.

And on the same page, you refer to the displacement map as blender_6 and I'm pretty sure you meant your blender_4, which was my blender_3.  (LOL)  At that point my head was spinning, so I did a quick render and went to bed.  It came out ok, but definitely needed the gamma correction.

So with all that said, let me ask a couple of questions.   I don't have any textures with SSS maps, but I hear they exist.  So I'll let Poser build that one, but if I have sheen (specular?) maps and displacement maps that I like, should I plug those in instead, and blend them in as you have done?  I'll do some comparisons when I get this done.

I'm looking forward to working with GC and AO part, because I'd really like to know how to put that on a texture that I otherwise already like.

Thanks for building this, any chance to learn something new from someone is wonderful.  And thank you BB for taking a look at it too.

Indi.

Edit:  Um... somehow I had only read page 1 before I typed this long post.  I see there may be enormous changes anyway, so I'll be patient, hehe, sorry!