First off, here it is 
Second: RENDER TIMES! This took 4 days to render on quite a number of high-processor machines. Oh boy. Derek Barker helps do our optimizations and got this down to 15 minutes a frame but… SSS can really get to you. Anyone have any ideas to speed up rendertimes?
All hail Ray & Clovis
I like this style better you can feel the 3d 
I don’t know what optimizations you have already done, but if I was doing the render setup I would bake most if not all the lighting for the background. Also, 15 mins per frame for HD output is not much for pathtracers with medium/low noise threshold desired, especially on CPU.
Looks good though!
render in Unreal Engine 4 (free for now) :evilgrin:
render the SSS pass with Blender internal and merge it with cycles?
http://urchn.org/post/combining-blender-internal-and-cycles-in-one-render
Heyyyyyy besides having a neat look, that was actually quite funny!. I think this characters could have a bright future. Ever thought of selling this to kid channels like Discovery Kids or disney XD?
Really cool! You guys have a new fan now!
Agree, you could use ue 4. If that does not interest you, have you tried the adaptive sampling patch?
We have tried the AS branch but we cant use it unless its in an official build we dont want to mess up stuff 
Are you using CPU or GPU rendering?
If you’re using the GPU with the experimental kernel, then keep in mind that SSS can actually be slower on the GPU than the CPU (due to the difficulty in making such a complex shader run on an architecture designed more for simpler instructions).
@Ace - CPU on several machines, GPU just for planning and testing mostly.
Nice work, I really like the progress you make!
About render times: 15 minutes are not that bad actually! Keep in mind that you have SSS and GI in a pure pathtracer! At work we try to keep render times below 15 minutes but that doesn’t always work, even whitout GI (in C4D btw). But of course speedup would be nice.
Looking forward to the next vlog episode!
hmmm, SSS is normally used for materials like milk, materials that reflect but the light beams penetrate a bit too, and the material is a bit transparant but only little bit under the surface. Used in cartoon style movies, people use it for the soft shader (between light and shadow) mostly.
But… thinking about this wanted effect in cartoon, could a cartoon shader combined with a a difuser shader using some add mix shaders get near the same feeling ?, cartoon shader as basicly you like to ditch normal bsdf materials loook of how shading apears on them, just ideas not worked out… or perhaps some OSL shader ?, i think for cartoons its not realy the sss complexity your after its more the single tone color you want, with less sharp shadow effects.
Have you tried the production SSS shader on the blender market? It’s supposed to be a nice blend of accuracy and speed, but I cannot vouch for it yet as I haven’t had a chance to try it. I’m curious myself.
SSS was just a test we are probably going to ditch it next episode if we can find a decent alternative… It doesn’t necessarily have to be translucent. TBH we arent looking for a solution to fast render times we know exactly why its taking so long.
And @@Ace_Dragon we are using about 10 (It varies depending what time it is) dual xeon machines xeon 2660 v3 and up. So thats a maximum of 320 threads that could be rendering.
Another idea comes to mind.
If you’re using the Branched Path Tracing mode, then it can be quite slow for complex shading compared to plain pathtracing (for some of my scenes it can be up to 3 times slower).
I know that some argue that it’s actually the faster mode, but unless your shaders are simple, it simply isn’t true.
i kept thinking about this problem, with smooth cartoon shaders, you can get something close like it…
However it works only nice on smoothed faces.
Perhaps more practical since their rendering on CPU, is use some OSL script.
Or perhaps a matcap material emulator like : https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/2034/can-cycles-do-a-gooch-shader
…Maybe a nice net story would be gloovis buying new sunglasses (looking trough them varies their skin shader
Do you have an example file uploaded anywhere for us to actually diagnose the file as see what we can do to accelerate the renders?
We know without a doubt branched is much faster in our scenes. If we do not use branched the noise is almost impossible to get rid of. we usually have around 6 lights in an interior scene (ye ye I know interiors are the slowest ever)