Thanks guys!
The ghoul will get some sparsely scattered frizzy hair to finish it off, but I want to complete the body first. So yes, it’s going to be a full character, and there’ll be many of them in the final animation (hundreds maybe?). Oh, I gotta fix the eyes too (not organic enough)!
Geddart: Actually I didn’t use Z-Brush. I’ve been watching the Z-Brush videos and stuff, tried the old demo, I really like how it works. But I can’t afford it yet though… so I took the lower tech approach, paint the displace in Photoshop, render to check, back and forth.
The displacements render quite fast without GI, about 2 min. per headshot. With GI it jumps to 15 min, but I suspect the new build will make it faster. I’m just a little afraid to try it at the moment since it took quite long to settle on the skin settings. A high res version is being rendered right now, it’ll take awhile. So until then, here are some skin settings! 
http://www.collective-expressions.com/portfolio/character/skin\_basic.jpg
The basic concept is to mask a non scattering material (the top epidermis layer) with a scattering one (the lower dermis layer). A lot of the blending between the two is based on Stahlberg’s skin tutorial, and is done with a shadow/light falloff map.
Keep in mind this material has a very shallow scatter. For the ears and stuff, a more scattered one will have to be made and blended in on thinner parts of the mesh with a mask. Also, it’s far from a one material fit all solution… and I haven’t really tested it with diffuse maps put in yet, just flat color or procedurals. If you’re getting “dirt” on it, the refract interpolation needs to be upped, this may happen on distance shots on high detail models. Hope you find it useful!
EDIT: Forgot to add, I’m not sure how these settings work on 1.46.12, I’m still on .10 at the moment (might skipover .12 in fact due to the blotches reported in the other thread).
Regards,
Yi-Piao
