Hey guys, I don’t know if you have seen this before, but I think it could be useful for the developers.
http://graphics.pixar.com/library/index.html
I don’t know anything about coding, but it seems to be interesting 
Let me know what you think, and if it really could be useful hehe.
Chances are the devs are well aware of the Pixar, Disney, and Dreamworks libraries, but I’d wager that many users are not so it will be good for them to see the link. Unfortunately the lion’s share of Pixar papers involve tricks specific to REYES techniques, so they aren’t a ton of use to Blender devs, but the more general ones about animation and such are great. However, many of them use patented algorithms and ideas, which don’t really jive well with Blender.
I think it’s a great thread, just keep all posts with relevant links and info.
SSS realtime (viewport)
http://www.iryoku.com/screen-space-subsurface-scattering
BSSRDF for rendering images of translucent materials
http://www.eugenedeon.com/qd.html
Interactive Rendering of Translucent Deformable Objects(2003)
http://research.edm.uhasselt.be/~tmertens/papers/itrans_electronic.pdf
Just throwing it out there that the chances of getting quantized diffusion in Cycles are slim to none. The entire process start to finish, basically everything that make it special, is patented. It also goes against the end goals of Brecht in that it requires a VERY hefty precalculation pass, even more than the standard dipole SSS model used in Mitsuba (and Arnold, until recently). It takes nearly 3 times as long to calculate. There is more and more research being done for fast, pure raytraced SSS (it was used in Hotel Transylvania) and that is almost definitely the direction Cycles SSS should take.
You can still get any of these papers/theories into blender by doing research on your own time and implementing them on your own. I’ve bought Jensens book on Photon mapping to integrate into the open source Pixie renderman compliant renderer. Its actually not that hard to understand after reading the book and programming for a long time. I had no idea about the quantized diffusion but what I’m looking at looks fucking amazing.
Imo a lot of people get scared away from trigonometry, calculus and programming but if you stick with it the rewards will be there - for you, personally. Maybe not for others since you cant merge it into official blender. But, you will still have the results for your own work.
I understand some matchs, do program for a living but it’s on scriptbased projects. web. I wish I was able to spend time to migrate to closer to the metal langs, like C. C++. Not that I ever would be able to code on a renderer I think. But yeah, I will post all the papers i find, I read them for the fun of it.
Would be cool if blender could get a close knitted core of devs focusing on the renderer only. Seems like brecht need to bug fix etc, imo he’s way to important for the render engine. And it seems to be what he likes the most to do since he basically invented cycles. and before that worked on octane.