Something I've been thinking about in terms of diffuse maps lately is that there's rarely enough variation in colour - another factor that might be affecting how we read resulting renders.

It only takes a slight indication of some blue/green veins to sing out nicely against the warmer flesh tones, perhaps some slight cooling in areas around the eye-sockets, temples and chin etc (subtle, like). Very often diffuse skin maps have just an all-over, averaged colouration with variations in tone - not enough for a convincing impression of skin layers and the underlying bone structure.

Ideally though It'd be nice to see some specialist maps for attempting some of that layering in a more physical way - local colour, SSS colour, veins etc, along with blow-out displacements.

I'm not sure the scatter node itself gives us enough control to play with some of these layering techniques properly; or the custom scatter. What we can do is pretty cool though, even if it does take some playing with.

 

PoserPro2014(Sr4), Win7 x64, display units set to inches.

                                      www.danielroseartnew.weebly.com