using vrayscattervolume for sss

[super gnu]

in the documentation it states that the scattervolume can be used in a blend material for sss effects, however ive not found a way to get a convincing result.

it would be AMAZING if i could take (for example) a plastic material ive worked up using vraymaterial, and am happy with, and simply "add" some sss to it.

-my current project was initially deemed to not need sss, since it was problematic to achieve (see below) but later a new shot really highlighted the missing aspect.

im dreaming of an sss tickbox and "strength slider" in the vray material being the ideal.

recreating the material from scratch using fastsss isnt a very nice option, since its a more limited material than the full vraymat. and would result in lots of work to arrive at a similar look.

ive never got good results with translucency settings in the vraymat either.


any suggestions? a solid workflow using either scattervolume or translucency settings would be nice if i cant have a tickbox.


on a related note, it would be great if (even a "fake") sss could work on open meshes.

my project is for a certain plastic brick company, using provided models with thousands of bricks, and all the logos and brick pins are open meshes. no instancing. testing fastsss showed lots of nasty defects... no possibility to remodel or clean every element.

[JonasNöll]

Hi, you could use the translucency option in the V-Ray Material to add this effect instead?
As a starting point just set your refraction and fog color to Mid-Grey and try with the the Hard/Wax Model in the translucency and then take it from there. The values that you want to tweak then are the refraction color, fog color/bias/falloff, and backfacing color. Since you describe you want to mix it with the existing shaders remember that if you set your refraction to pure white you won't get any diffuse contribution.
For the usecase that you describe this should be probably sufficient

Anyway if you have broken geometry then you might need to find a fix for that first, as probably all sort translucency, sss will give you issues.
You might in this case try to fake it with something in the SelfIllum to get a similar effect. That wouldn't be so easily affected by broken geometry at least. Create a composite in the SelfIllum and play around with fallofs, VRayDirt and so on. It's fake but will render fast and possibly can also create a similar effect, depending on what you are trying to achieve.