Quote - That book does looks very interesting - thanks for the link.

Here's a few direct questions, related more to the use of maps in the VSS PR3 shader setup (since we don't have a true SSS system in Poser I'm assuming things might be a little different from some of the tutorials I've been looking at for 3dsMax or Maya, but this may be wrong):

1. What should a caucasian diffuse map look like? - i.e. what colour bias should it have (red/yellow, neutral/saturated?) - when using environment lighting I've noticed skin can often take on a lot of the colour casts (mine often look overly yellow). What other colour variations should it ideally contain?

Like a dead person - pale greenish yellow. Like the color of fingernail clippings. Like parchment.  Like the skin of a butchered chicken in the supermarket. All the red/pink - all of it - comes from blood. In the absence of SSS of blood, the skin is pale yellow. If you're going to deal with red SSS, you want the diffuse color to be bloodless.

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2. What should an SSS map look like? If it's a B&W tone map what does black/white equate to in terms of the PR3 SSS? Where would you plug an SSS map in?

It shoud look like a smooth low-frequency image (blurry) and be britgher where the skin is more sanguinated. In PR3 you'd plug it into PM:SSS. Where is the skin more sanguinated? That depends on the age, sex, and alcoholic content of the individual being simulated.

Quote - 3. If I'm going to include some form of environmental reflections in my shader setup, how might this affect my diffuse and specular maps?

It wouldnt' affect those maps at all. An increase in reflection occurs at shallow viewing angles of incidence, which depends on pose and camera position. You cannot take this into account in a map, as it would be a "burned in" feature, just as bad as burned in specular for exactly the same reason. It's a 3D effect, not a 2D mapping.

Quote - I guess a lot of this skin stuff in Poser is a little make-shift anyway. Often when I get skin set up in one lighting state and looking great but then shift to another set of lights it all falls apart.

 
Absolutely - and while you'll never achieve your maximum realism in all conditions, you certainly can improve your worst realism in your worst conditions.

This is something I seem to have trouble making the community understand, in a larger sense. All scenes (lighting, camera, shaders, etc) are approximations. The degree to which these approximations match some objective reality in the Poser constrained environment is not very great, but there is no excuse for the terrible results we often see. A few more nodes can increase the maximum and the minimum achieved realism.

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Renderosity forum reply notifications are wonky. If I read a follow-up in a thread, but I don't myself reply, then notifications no longer happen AT ALL on that thread. So if I seem to be ignoring a question, that's why. (Updated September 23, 2019)