Yet another reason why Poser needs all new lights and/or an all new render engine before it can have "real" SSS: it's all wrong in Poser.

Sure, the lights can cast rays like any raytracer, but Poser's raytracing is as simple as it gets in the 3D world - shadows are straight and don't even come close to real physics.

Render engines such as Mental Ray, VRay and LightWave have lights such as area lights which cast more realistic shadows. Even with a very bright light source, an object's shadow won't be a hard edge along the whole thing. The farther along the surface the shadow is cast on, the more blurred the edges should get - in the real world. And the above-mentioned raytracers can do that with area lights as well as directional lights. You want that in Poser, well... you can't have it with the current lights and Firefly. There's the blur setting, but that's not realistic at all.

Yeah I know this thread is about SSS, but as I've said before and I'll say again, Poser needs alot of work with its lights and render engine before it's ever going to be able to do anything but unrealistic fakes and clever workarounds.

I personally don't think it's going to happen. That's why they created the Poser Fusion plugins - to get Poser stuff into more capable programs with more capable render engines, and I think the best we could hope for in Poser 8 will be more 64 bit and multi-threaded integration, and better support for Poser Fusion and the newer versions of the target apps.
I can't imagine how much it would cost them to license Mental Ray, for example, and I'm not real confident that a maker of cell phone software is going to create a modern, fast, and efficient new 3D render engine for Poser.
Of course, the information on how to do all that it is out there. The capable programmers are out there too. But the cost of it all will be the reason Poser never improves much, and why there will always be more of an emphasis on getting Poser stuff into other apps.

On the other hand, I bet Content Parasite will continue to be worked on and grow and thrive...