maybe everyone already knew this, but kinda stumbled on this the other day and thought it worked splendidly.
The lamp material is just a standard mat with about 85% opacity. stick an omni in there, and fiddle with the inverse square spinner, and woila! looks pretty decent and seems to render fairly quickly.
looks great, thanks for the tip 
Thanks for the tip, looks good. Did you model the lamp center or is displacement?
That does look really good. But, it’s not fake SSS, is it? What I mean is, a lamp shade would be opaque - that’s the nature of the paper or fabric it is made from. I can’t imagine that you’d ever want to use SSS on a lamp shade, since the material itself has essentially no thickness, and therefore nowhere for light to scatter inside.
As I understand it, SSS is for objects with thickness (and therefore opacity alone will not suffice) in which light enters then bounces around a bit, such as skin, cheese, milk, marble, etc.
thanks for the comments. I should restate that its more of a fake for use in very specific circumstances. In the past I would fake it with a gradient in the self illum slot and fiddle until it looked right. with this, the light is contributing to it, so it looks better and requires less setup time.
There is no displacement anywhere. Its just a texture ripped off a clients cut sheet.
nice one percy.
hopefully the new fast sss shader will do this too!
Excellent tip 
Thanks!
I tried your method and had issues looking at non-curved (straight) shade from straight-on. The shade was transparent and you can see there were no fittings in it. So it seems this method only works in certain circumstances.
Yep I have to agree.
I found normal SSS to work quite well as well.
Still needs alot of work…but just a test scene… so meh. (dont know where all that damn noise on the leather is coming from.)
This work fine with normal rendering output, but what if i need to render out different channel? i believed the standard max material render black in the VRAY diffuse channel.