Fast Subsurface for Cycles (Natjo Edit)

(Example renders at bottom)

Blender 3.1 error: For some reason one of the shader groups mixShader nodes disconnected itself in Blender 3.1. Don't know what has caused this, but to fix the error you just have to go into the shader properties and reconnect the transparency shader to the mixShader node.

The original version of this was not created by me. This is a seriously old Shader I’ve brought back into the light, giving it an alpha detection and automatic depth detection. Might port it to work properly in EEVEE, but EEVEE’s subsurface is already insanely powerful as it stands. I’ll be adding more features to it as time goes on as the need arises, but for now this is how it’ll be.

Since this shader is so old I can’t find the original creator of it. If anyone knows who it was I’ll happily give them the bulk of the credits for this shader. As a result I’m not putting this under the Basic Simple product line. This is just simply something I think more people should have access to.

If said original creator wishes for me to take this down, I will do so.

Anyways…

This is the FSS shader (Fake SubSurface), a insanely fast way of faking Subsurface. It isn’t perfect, but it has it’s pros and cons.

Pros: More control of the colour output, the amount of subsurface, doesn’t use up much render time at all (an additional 10 seconds at the very most), gets away from that milky look Subsurface usually brings, since it’s so fast it is way less noisy for Blender’s denoisers to deal with so you get better frame consistency.

Cons: Isn’t an accurate version of Subsurface at all, is still technically a solid object so light bouncing can look a tad weird, can discolour surfaces if not used in moderation.

This does work with EEVEE, but it looks insanely awful and takes longer than normal EEVEE subsurface so I don’t recommend using EEVEE with this.

To use this shader, apply it with a mixed shader from the group menu.

If you use this shader for an animation or render, please contact me at Natjobot@gmail.com, not for like any business reasons, I just reaaaaally wanna see this in action outside of my own animations ^u^'

Example Renders:
I used my RTX 3070 for these renders, using default Blender settings. Name and results are set as: [Shader being used] - [Time]

FSS - About 1 minute 5 seconds per frame

No SS - About 57 seconds per frame

Real SS - About 2 minutes 45 per frame