Hello everyone thanks for the shader and info im new to mental ray and im having a problem with this shader, i get good sss on my character until i turn on raytrace shadows then it dissapears. this has only happened on surfaces with openings and it may have to do with the fact that the character is subd’s. the sss appears extreme around the openings in the model then dissapears when the shadows are turned on. Any suggestions mental ray wizards thanks
pSSSt....
excuse me mattcioffi
I am having that same problem with the artifacts you described above. the renders are almost exactly just how i want them except for a few dark polygonal artifacts at the base of the neck. how did you deal with this if you dont mind me asking. could it have something to do with the fact that im using maya subd surfaces?
wee! what a nice shader. Thanks to all the people involved!
Steven Stahlberg pointed me to this one and after fighting the system for a couple hours I feel I’m finally gaining control over it. The defaults worked nicely for most test-objects, but when applied to my orc model I was getting the weirdest results. Kind of narrowed this down to a scale-thing; the orc was modeled in m and imported in a scene set to cm, so now he is only about 3 mm tall 
Seems like I had to set the intensity really low (0.008) to get acceptable results.
But hey: that kind of familiarized me with the parameters 
So here he goes: no color or bump map, cps proxy with displacement map, 3 directional lights (2 rims and a fill) and one area light (key).
Still a bit on the waxy side, but getting there I guess.
Rendertime: 7 minutes 27 ack 

thanks.
here’s a new test with a layered shader (didn’t get the mix8layer to work in 5.0.1… hints anyone?) that uses a bump map on a transparent blinn for specularity.
I also used an HDRI with Final Gathering and was able to even reduce the render time to 7 minutes 1.5 seconds 

That looks much better, i don’t know about the eyes(they look to bright to me) but the rest is very good, nice work. Good to see this shader capabilities in skilled hands.
thanks again! I haven’t built proper shaders for the eyes, teeth and gums yet; focussed on the skin exclusively.
The nice thing about using Final Gather is that it helps smoothing the graininess of the area light and the diffusion itself; I was able to get away with 8 samples for diffusion and 3/3 for the area light!
It’s an awesome shader!
I used the SSS fast shader as my base shader and put the diffusion shader on the ambience channel. I know my model looks like a plastic doll but annyway keep up the good work with the shader !! everything done inside maya
Hi
I didnt visit this thread for ages, and it seems there is a lot of fun here, and nice renderings indeed.
I remembred the diffusion shader and decided to play again with it, so I reloaded an old head, rendered to several passes, the last one with the sss enabled getting its calculation from the lights coming from the back. So here I’m:

PS: I’ve just seen that it’s noisy? Maybe I have to adjust my monitor.
Hello
Does any one know how i can reduce the the inside of my model’s nostrils from being so hot through to the outside of the surface. the whole model is looking really good and realistic with this shader,FG and dirtmap but the nostrils are modelled up into the nose and that surface is creating a reallt hot light on the outside of the nostrils, the only setting that seems to work is lowering the diffusion really low but it creates artifacts that even maxed out samples cant fix
Hi - does the diffusion shader work with Maya 6.1? I had it working in 6 but MR aborts when I try to use it now.
hi, just a quick query.
how do i assign the mix8layer material to an object, it seems a dumb question but when i right click the node theres no option to assign. Is this normal is there another way. Thanks in advance. Where can i also download the Rind dirtmap material for maya.
thankyou.
hi there! tried the shader out! very intresting. im very happy i could actually intsall it and run it without any serious problems. and very cool that it works with FG and Global illumination. So thank you for that! Now im just having one problem im getting it to look ok, but i cant get the transparancy in it. I tried out the popsicle scene. with the diffusion for maya and the dll downloaded from the first page of this thread. when i renderd the objects they didnt show at all (now the ones with the shader anyway). and then when i installed the update wich i found later it crashed when i rendered. maybe im mising a file or something? Ive got the raytraced shadows on but it still doesnt work. odd. any ideas?
I like the image… but because it looks blown out (stylistic hard lighting), it doesn’t really show the nuances that the SSS is supposed to pick up.
and the rendertime is quite fast!