Just for the fun, i dont pretend to be a shader guru like BB or RobinsVeil, and i dont know how to use parmatic, i've made a little skin shader with a render really close to the VSS but it use less nodes and less render time ( - 20 %) , what do you think ? I've just use the "inbox " fonctions of poser not mathematics ...

All the render have the same settings ...

The first with the indoor02 light from BB ...

The second one infinite light in front of Victoria ...

And the last one infinite light left of Victoria ...

Looks Great to me

Very good match. Just so you know, the reason the VSS has so many nodes is not because they are needed, but because it is 10,000 shaders in one, and because I did not write the shader, so it is not optimized. I wrote a program that wrote the shader, so that I can turn features on and off and produce different shaders instantly. The program does all the wiring.

Did you provide all of the adjustable parameters I have (Gamma, Tint, Shine, Shine Spread, Shine Value, Diffuse Reflectivity, SSS, SSS Color, SSS Falloff, Boost, etc.), or is it fixed at one appearance? 

If you wanted just a fixed shader, I could do that for you automatically. I just plug in the actual numbers instead of allowing them to be variable. Then the program that generates the shader would make a lot fewer nodes.

Anthanasius, I'd like to see your node set up. To BB, I'd like to see the 'streamlined' VSS. In other words, I'd like to see both! :)

I know BB, later i add somes mask nodes ( easy for me with a little number of nodes ), as i said before, it's a really simple shader, may be it can be used with many people in the same scene ..

Please dont laugh :lol:

Here it is ... :blushing:

Ah - using Poser Pro render GC?

Nice work - yes that is the basic skin shader with a nice little cheat for SSS, but no nodes for GC because you can let Poser handle it.

Beautiful work.

What would be the setup WITH CG? For Poser 6 users?

Yes posepro and yes it's a really basic shader but i've worked a lot of hour for faking SSS  ...

Here is the CG shader ...

In your last comparison, the one with the infinite light from the side, you can see a big difference in the faked SSS. The VSS one can put it in the right place, but your EdgeBlend cannot. It's a minor difference, but that is the key difference to why the VSS shader is more realistic.

Even the VSS one is wrong, but the only way around it is to program the shader to know where the light is coming from, the way face_off does. The difference then would be that you'd see some red in the shadow area.

Ummmm *putting up hand very hesitantly* I know that most of your math discussions go way, way over my head, but I thought there was one set up that you showed that could detect light direction, or at least when AO is concerned. If I'm wrong, please, please don't kick my ass *smirk*. Oh, by the way, I added these nodes to a hair shader last night and it looked quite nice.

That was just a cheap little trick to make material-based AO vary its effect based on which way the surface faces with respect to up or down. This was compensating the AO shadow to be less strong when the surface faces the sky. This isn't much help for determining where sub-surface scattering would pass through a surface and bring light from the lit side to the shadow side of a terminator (shadow edge).

Okay, got it.