CGCookie – Skin Shading with Cycles in Blender

Skin shading isn’t new to the Blender Cookie training catalogue. But it is new to the Cycles rendering engine! So that’s why we’re revisiting the topic again. Besides, skin shading is such a difficult thing to get right that’s it’s a good idea to revisit occasionally from a new perspective.

What you’re going to learn:

The key to skin shading in Cycles is the relatively new “Subsurface Scattering” node. This “BSSRDF” surface type is essentially a fully-featured translucent material allowing light to partially pass through your object. A crucial characteristic of human skin.

In Lesson 1 I will walk you through more of a simplistic approach to skin shading using the Subsurface Scattering node basically by itself.
In Lesson 2 I will show you a more complex approach based on Matthew Heimlich’s Arnold Skin Shader Port. This prefab shader group offers traditional tri-layer skin construction that’s standard with commercial renderers like Vray, Mental Ray, and of course Arnold.