hey guys i saw someones post somewhere (sorry cant remember who) about faking sss for skin and decided to play around with a skin shader and came up with some nice results i thought some ppl might be interested in…of the six examples they started at the top left and i worked my way through to the bottom right improving as i went.
hope this might help someone
-timmo
nice job timmo. did you use the ramp shaders?
yep sure did!! they are great for things like skin…thers also some translucency and some very slight emit
-timmo
Good results. mind sharing the blend files to check out the settings.
thanks.
I’m the one (who did the post, I mean 
). You can se the thread I started here:
https://blenderartists.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=29267
I would have been glad if your post was in my thread, but nevermind, I’m happy that it inspired you 
Your results are quite good, and I think that your Ramp parameters could be a good base for me as I’m currently working on mines, trying to mix them with my translucensy parameters. I’d also be glad if you could put your own work in my thread in order to centralize SSS-works, just as Modron put in a Modelling thread, Fligh % a Fiber thread, etc. If you don’t mind, of course…
BTW, iluvblender, my own blendfiles with my technique of SSS-faking are available in my thread
Waiting for more…
Nice, I haven’t gotton 2.34 yet but the ramp shaders really do look as if they work wonders
That is coming along well, I’ll have to learn from you 
PS. What is SSS? I’ve seen people mention it, but not quite sure what it is, some sort of lighting setup for rendering?
This is subsurface scattering… For what i understand from it without making research about it, it tries to simulate the way how light diffuse/propagate inbetween layers of skins, but it’s also useful for such materials like jade and (I’m not sure this one is true, though) even metals.
There’s no SSS feature in Blender right now, but there’s an attempts faking it using (it seems, because nothing is yet documented) radiosity results as basis of calculation through a python script, or by using the translucy property of materials.
SSH is a technique that does fake the scatering of light underneath the surface. You hardly ever notice this effect in real live but once you try to simulate uman skin in a 3d program you will notice the lack of SSH.
Try to keep your hands in front of a bright spotlight in a dark room and you will see that your hand is translucent but, now the SSH part of the story, the light seems to bend around the bones a little so the part that should be completely black due to the shadow of the bone, is actually a little lit. But like I said it’s so subtile that it’s hard to notice.
And OliveS as far as I know SSH wont occur on a metal surface because the density of the surface is so high that the light cant get trough and so cant scatter at the underlying layer. SSH does work on cellulair materials.
This is what I learn’t about it but since I learned in a language that is not my native I might made some mistakes… 
sorry guys ive been away for a few days, anyways the blend file is available for download http://home.iprimus.com.au/snapper63/skin.blend its 1meg.
hope that helps…and advice for further refinements would be appreciated
-timmo