It’s been a long waited feature for Blender, and finally SSS is here. That’s Sub-Surface Scattering for those of you not familiar with the acronym. It means that the light penetrates the object surface and reflects / refracts in the depth of the object, not only on the surface.
What does it mean to have support for this? At least more realistic skin, but generally speaking better and more realistic materials for your renders.
I know of at least a few projects that have been waiting for this feature to be available in Blender before they start to work seriously. So hopefully with this feature released (once 2.67 is officially released) we’ll start seeing a lot more quality productions featuring Blender and Cycles.
In order to add support for this on RenderStreet, we have put up a recent SVN version of Blender (r55780) which includes SSS support. The image rendered above is based on Matt Heimlich’s Arnold skin shader project. It uses 5000 samples and it was rendered in 4:42 minutes. These look like reasonable times, considering the quality of the image and the fact that it is rendered on CPU.
Working on anything interesting using SSS? Let us know in the comments.
