How do i turn on subsurface scattering??

i have a cube with a light in front of it and a camera behind it. I used “Subsurface Scattering” as the material for the cube but the cube turned black and no light is penetrating through it, its just black… I set the lamp light very high, still no light coming through, what else do i have to do?? why is this not working?

There is no sub-menu option that I can check mark and choose, subsurface scattering, I have to choose it as a material for the cube. the Blender wiki manual seems to think there is a menu option for that on the properties menu… Nope.

blender V2.68 Cycles render. Thanks in advance.

Subsurface scattering for cycles http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Doc:2.6/Manual/Render/Cycles/Nodes/Shaders#Subsurface_Scattering
Have you tried blender 2.69 which has SSS http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Dev:Ref/Release_Notes/2.69/Cycles

the Blender wiki manual seems to think there is a menu option for that on the properties menu… Nope.
Yes there is but it sounds like you are reading the wiki for blender internal materials, not for the cycles renderer

Simple example


Thanks I’ll give that a try when i get a chance! I thought V2.68 had subsurface scattering? Has it just been added recently?

Hi, you cant use GPU for SSS it is CPU only.

Cheers, mib.

In Soviet Russia SSS turns you on. Perhaps you are in Russia?

Your right! I am so mad that GPU cannot do Subsurface Scattering… why NOT!

SSS is a hard operation to do on the GPU because of the difference in how it handles and computes instructions, GPU cores currently cannot handle all of the complexities that a CPU can do and there is a lot of such complexity in most SSS shaders.

Now it is true that Octane does have GPU-based SSS and we’ve even seen signs that Cycles SSS may eventually run smoothly on it as well, but even Otoy has not yet found how to do without using a lot of memory, which is a precious commodity on the GPU.

Because it’s not coded. Only Octane has SSS on the GPU, and it’s bleeding edge tech. Raytraced SSS by its nature does not lend itself well to GPU computation.

Ahh makes sense, cant wait for it to come to GPU