Three Layer SSS in Blender Demystified « BenSimonds.com. Something that gives a lot of people trouble when creating characters is implementing convincing subsurface scattering (SSS). Blender’s SSS shader comes with a wealth of options that make it easy to customise how light scatters under a surface, but also makes it tough to hit on what options exactly make for convincing skin. Using a node based approach, one can create a three layer SSS shader that gives good, and reasonably physically correct results, and also makes making adjustments fairly straightforward. in this tutorial I use blender 2.5, but I used almost the exact same setup for my blending life entry in 2.49 and got much the same results (just without such fast ray-tracing, thanks blender devs!).
The Basics: A three layer SSS shader emulates skin by splitting the effect of the different layers of skin into different materials: Important SSS Settings: IOR: Index of refraction – this is the same as the IOR for raytraced reflection and refraction, and reflects the IOR of the medium. ZBrush Sub-Surface Scattering. Maya SSS shader tutorial 3-2. Maya SSS shader tutorial 3-1. VrayForMaya: FastSSS - Part1. VrayForMaya: FastSSS - Part2.