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Haha if you put on chrono SSS settings and go with full SSS maps, it takes HORRIBLY long, or say exactly three times as long?
It sometimes takes an hour with 2 1080tis rendering a portrait with nothing, literally nothing in the scene 
Of cause. But a good diffuse showing all the (color) details of the skin - and only those - is the indispensable base.
This is the reason why I loved to work with displacement. The normal method for 3Delight, but not that simple usable with iRay. If you really have got a pure 3D map of the 3-dimensional surface details, with iRay the best way is to have it as a normal map. Cause we all know: iRay needs a geometry detailing fine enough to produce the 3-dimensional details when using displacement. And this would shoot the memory need far beyond the capacities of the biggest GPU-cards. Same for what you said about the
True that, but again putting it into diffuse node dramatically reduces its texture details so
Haha! I never managed to get my hand on a proper displacement map work, it just all goes completely crazy for me in Iray, gotta go back to zbrush and get as much detail as possible from everything
or hope and pray that the normal map is good enough 
What?
Did you only work with low-res pics?
Topic "source for realistic skin textures:
You may have a look at "FWSA Skinvent Details Merchant Resource for Genesis 3 Male(s)". What do you see looking at the promos (esp. the shown face map)? Still specular effect built into the diffuse map.
No no no! Crap I have no idea what I said there
I actually meant using the old style of "diffuse-specular-bump" reduces the skin details because it is plain painted and does not properly react to light
Do they actually? Can't seem to find the topic nor the product
Yep. Bump is able to imitate the up/down of the surface and displaying it pretty well, but just the moment there is a different prop casting a shadow on it, you see, that the surfces simply is plain. Bump is not able to calculate the consequent effect.
Here it is. Just see the displayed fraction of the face skin texture on the second promo-pic.
Still really hard to tell for me! I guess sometimes I just fix up specular with skin tone
Well, thank you very much for that! Using the diffuse map for translucency certainly helped getting my renders closer to the "box art" appearance, instead of getting a tanned look whatever I tried.
For Translucency color and Transmitted color, I used a very light pink (one more notch, and it'd be off-white, but that was personal preference). The "value" you mention must be "Translucency Weight".
It seems proper Iray lighting (even the default set of Iray lighting) further helps getting a nice render, rather than boosting some regular lights from the top menu to half a million lumens. Don't ask me why, but it simply works out better.
Maybe this is not how the whole skin lighting thing is intended to work, but for new users, it's a lot easier to work with. More complex mechanics can come later, figuring out 2-3 new things for a new render is just so much more managable than the deep plunge users have to take after going through (and forgetting half) the tutorial.
Sorry, but the best way to make up and/or check if a skin shader looks realistic is the use of a neutral light (spotlight) with a temperature of about 5000 K and "Film ISO" of 200.0 max. Both Sun-Sky and HDRi tend to colorize the final result. The shader may look great in that particular light setup, but might look not so great up to rubbish in another. If a skin shader looks realistic under a neutral light, it will still look realistic in any other light. In case it won't then it's most likely the used HDRi which is crappy.
For "Tranylucency Color", I'd recommend an RGB 217-133-114 orange (based on real-world measured absorption coefficients of subdermal skin tissues, liquids and blood, the color of the Dermis would be of a light orange). Or alternatively, like DAZ introduced with Victoria 8, a slightly overworked Diffuse Texture (estimated values : Hue: -5, Saturation: -10, Lightness: +25) with a neutral RGB 255 white.
"Transmitted Color" should be the skin tone picked from the Diffuse Texture, in combination with a "Transmitted Measurement Distance" of 1.00. That's the only way to determine the correct amount of light of a certain wavelength which will get transmitted through the material.
That's true, instead of boosting the light mindlessly, one should use lights with lumens they'd have in the real world (a common 100 watt light bulb f.e. has ~ 1600 Lumen [1521.00] ), and then customize the Shutter Speed and Film ISO parameters to get the appropriate "Exposure Value".
Haha, I do agree with you here, my point up there was made to simply state that forced 3-4+ light system isn't the best way to show the skin realism even if it might look good.
if you put sun-sky to mid-day with sun mostly up top, the color would be white. It is true that some HDRI doesn't use White as default white point which completely screws up the entire scene and hard to detect (at least for someone that does not have much experience in HDRIs I think) so yeah, one point light is indeed a good test
5000 on temperature tho, is that pure white or slightly red? I thought 6500 is actually pure white...
Well I'm back to doing things this way. I tried a new HRDi yesterday and the light intensity was so bright and the presumably the shader adjustments I copied from someone at DeviantArt so wrong that I could actually see the eyeballs and mouth through the head when I rendered! Of course completely unadjusted leaves the render far too dark & tan.
According to fellow DAZler and professional photographer AndyGrimm, color neutral light is around 4500 - 5000k in the photo and print industry. The reason that DAZ textures looking better at 6500k is because they're too much red saturated (compensating the blue in a 6500k light). That unfortunately applies to many of the Genesis 2 skin textures, with Victoria 6 being a good "bad" example. [To create PBR compatible textures it's needed to have the right color space set up (RGB: sRGB IEC6 1966-2.1, CYMK: U.S. Web Coated (SWOP) v2, Gray: Gray Gamma 2.2 and Spot: Dot Grain 20%) and a proper calibrated monitor.]
Color is one thing to solve, another is to get a convincing gloss. With the current available Specular Maps it is hard to achive, since they're all not 100% PBR compatible, a disadvantage of having them to have both work in 3Delight and Iray. The black in them would have to be between RGB 59 to RGB 61, with RGB 61 maximum, for the reflective surfaces of human skin, and less towards RGB 0 for wrinkles and pores. So they're still only usable (and used) in the "Weight" texture slots instead of the "Glossy Specular" ones which they would actually belong to.
Doesn't it have to do with monitors being calibrated to 6500k as an industry standard? I think most renderers use 6500k as the default white point for lights.
6500K tends blueish 5000K is closer to white and closer to what you'd see outside on a sunny day between the tropics.
As far as monitors go my 2011 HP laptop must be using between 5000K - 6500K while my 2006 Acer HD Monitor must be between 2700K - 3500K so the industry standard has changed even for consumer products.
Consumer monitors are all over the place. I was talking more about professional monitors for broadcast and such. Say you're watching CNN and they have a monitor in the back that shows some info to the viewer, this needs to be calibrated to a certain standard and as far as I know that is 6500k. Same as the material that is shown on the monitor was shot with 6500k. Same as the camera that broadcasts the show to your own TV. Or a projector in the movie theater as well, at least it should be so the movie is seen exaclty as shot.
I don't watch CNN or any other news show.
Consumer monitors & professional monitors are pretty much the same now as these big conglomerates wouldn't make enough profit from economies of scale selling professional monitors. What is different is how big they make the screen and frame and such, the visual screen tech is cookie cutter standard.
Yes, all sort of businesses will tell you otherwise and try to sell you calibration kits and lots of expensive things but that isn't the reality of the mass manufacture of those screen.
And if the monitors are really are calibrated to 6500K they are too blue for what normal daylight is and are not doing news reporting clarity any favors, 5500K would be the right value, not 5000K as I stated earlier.
The key is that consumer monitors aren't calibrated. They can be calibrated through software though, as well as possible, IPS panels are better for this. Top graphics monitors have inbuilt hardware calibration. Broadcast monitors (TV screens really) need to have calibration features or else they can naturally not calibrate them. Doesn't mean they need entirely different tech than consumer screens, but at least enough color settings so they can be calibrated which probably happens regularly. I know print graphics studios where color is critical also regularly have their monitors recalibrated. I'm assuming this happens in broadcast and movies as well because there needs to be one standard. They cannot have a monitor with an image more red than is recorded by the camera with a certain white balance. They need to match obviously.
On 6500k: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illuminant_D65
Wiki article or not, overcast skies are less common throughout the world then they are common and even in Europe there are plenty of days that are not overcast. When a 100W lightbulb is manufactured on an assembly line they are all manufactured to meet a light output tolerance. Billions of dollars are spent designing manufacturing processes to make such accuracy possible. And so it is with LCD panels. These LCD panels are not apples being picked off of trees or handblown glass tubes to be used in vacuums.
It's the same reason guitars and plenty of other manufactured items of the modern world, both leisure and needs based, are of better quality and much more standardly reliable and safe.