render pass problems

[sharktacos]

The rawLight pass gives you the amount of light that falls on a surface. For regular hard diffuse materials, the light bounces off the surface from the same point that it falls on. This is why multiplying the diffuse filter and the raw light works. For a SSS material, the light may exit from a different point, so using the raw light is not possible. Instead, you need to use the dedicated SSS2 element to get the component of the SSS material that is due to direct lighting. There is no "raw sss lighting" element for the moment, but you can get it by dividing the SSS element by the diffuse filter one.

Perhaps I'm not properly comprehending how to build this together in the comp, but when I render out a character with a SSS2 shader, and multiply the raw light and diffuse, it matches the beauty perfectly (even though it is an SSS2 shader). However, when I instead divide the SSS by the diffuse, and then multiply that into the diffuse, the result is darker than the beauty. What am I missing?