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More melanin means more absorption. African descent skin has the highest absorption coefficient (around 2.25 1/cm at 650 nm), and the curve over the wavelenth range is very steep towards the lower wavelengths (green and blue). It is also the skin with the lowest scattering coefficient, since most of the incident light is already been absorbed before it comes to scattering. But even then, scattering at red wavelengths is less than at the lower ones.
But the person you're showing is more of an african/caucasian mix, more in the range of asian or hispanic optical skin properties.
Here's the third with the other two. From left to right:
IG Skin Essentials Aiko6 adapted to Macroskin, with flat translucency .5, refraction-driven with translucency set to 0 and translucency weight map used for refraction, and then finally the first skin with translucency maps and translucency weight set to 1.0.
Generally, I prefer the third option. The person doesn't look so 'feverish' like a flat translucency, and doesn't have dry/dead look like the second...
dosent matter how dark.... fact is.. melanin is the main factor for skin color because it absorbs light ... lower light = darker albedo
Ths IS the basic of PBR.
most important sience proof which i have is : caucausian which are very pale as i am.. look blueish in winter.. = translucency can't be red
if i dont go in the sun for some months my refraction index is close to water 
@timmins.william
yes the third one looks best now.
I wonder what you do in winter getting cyanotic...
Refraction Index of skin depends more on content of water in the tissues. Why do you drink so much water when you don't go into the sun?!
Having seen the result of the lack of oxygenated blood flowing through a person first hand, I'm with Arnold C.
Of course, the end result is the mixture of all of the things we are talking about... but, that sort of experience has a tendecy to stick with you.
Back in the 3Delight heyday with pwSurface and other shaders, we would routinely tint the underlying diffuse in order to counteract the red in the diffuse textures; the idea being that we were going to add it back it with SSS. Translucency didn't really work all that well back then and it was mostly ignored, I think that is why we see people cranking SSS so much... trying to get that to do the job of what Translucency really should be doing.
And back on that cyanotic remark... when its cold, the capilaries in the outer dermis contract resulting in less blood flow near the surface... so what Andy observes is actually true, just maybe not as dramatic as he suggests.
well looking like water was a joke - but we would not see blood vessel bluish if the translucency woud be only full red...
Iray is limited : exactly because SSS is limited (if translucency would be full red then sss transmitted color would be also just red)... we need to have a part of SSS in the diffuse texture!
Heh, so in the end I loop back to what I was already doing.
I've been playing with the AJ Blood vessel thing, but it's only worth doing in extreme cases/closeups.
I find the idea of blood vessels to be not worth it. Its not about that level of detail, its about the overall effect... and its not the major blood vessels that really contibute to the effect, its the tiny, tiny little ones. I've seen some really horrendous work lately with huge blue veins that just about turned my stomach (not from you, Will).
Heh. Yeah. I just did a test with the blood vessels and, unless you are EXTREMELY close to candled ears, just not visible unless you are doing a translucent monster (which would then be worth it).
Blood vessels are just needed on a very pale skin and extrem close ups.....fully agreed.
@timmins.william
Your renders looking nice - do they look also good in HDRI light ?
Thanks! Those are actually Mec4D's free 'portraits' HDRIs she gave out a while back.
I'd like to take a lot of credit for it, but:
Mec4D freebie HDRI (the one with tight light spots). I rotated the dome a bit to get the light direction I wanted.
Parris Macroskin without brows
Laticis free G2F eyebrows with Unshaven 2 hair shader
And, in the first and third case, applying yesterday's Skin Essentials for Aiko 6 Iray skin settings. (Then in the third image applying V5 Bree Translucency weight and upped translucence to 1.0)
because of spots i tought there are spots
- what i meant is.. do they look good also in other hdri environment ? without searching for the nice "spot" ?
I am pretty happy with the trans weight approach I've mentioned before. Mind you, unless you specifically set up lights to candle the ears or fingers, it's not extremely noticeable. But I feel confident that when translucency should show, it's going to show realistically without the rest of the body glowing weirdly.
One think I've been expirimenting with good old tiling bump, the map is something I downloaded from an internet paper on skin microstucture which I made tiling, I've then stuck that map on the top coat bump set the top coat spec blend to fresnel and turned it way up most of the spec is top coat and doesn't use the spec map. nicest thing is with Iray we can tile everything independerntly with ease, so the tiling on the torso is higher than the face so the resolution looks roughly the same. What I need to do now is make myself a roughness map, as in general our shoulders are less glossy than our faces. to say nothing of our eyebrows.
One downside is its definitely slower to render
In general I'll probably tone down the effect for my final renders, as I'm more a fan of soft and painterly than aggressively attempted photorealism.
Also sidenote but this is absolutely my favorite character ever
Wow, nice. I wouldn't have expected that to be tiled.
And yeah, the 'everything can be tiled independently' is one of the big chunks of why I like Iray, particularly to balance things with cutouts and similar.
And just how the hell does one tile things independently? I've seen that mentioned, but..seems to me there is only one set of tiling controls in the Iray Uber shader.
@
j cade
For testing where i dont must care about eyebrows, and real microdetails - and other things.. i also use often use a tiling map such as the one here... (only large pores, but correct ones)
Right click on a texture map (using Iray Uber Shader), instead of using LIE use 'Image Editor.' Click the second tab, and you get Horizontal/Vertical tiling number.
Any texture map can be tiled that way -- though note that it doesn't show up properly in the 'texture view,' you only see it properly in Nvidia or an actual render.
Thanks, Will. I knew that was there... guess I just totally missed the application of it.
well use the map i posted about 30 times on the face and on the torso maybe 60 times...balance till it looks right and you dont have those anoying texture bump scale problem anymore (but others
I think it's either in LIE or the regular image editor. I have a render running right now, so can't check, and the grey RAM between my ears isn't too good.
simple in the image editor of your bump or normal map... i just checked.. i use the small 128 pix map with 100 tiles right now on the torso...(for testing)
The map I used I got from here, one of the cheek textures (though I had to make it tiling). I just realized I made it a while ago so I didnt save it as a hdr and lost some color data, time for a redo.
@andy Its a bit more agressively textured than yours, more going after aproximated microdetails than pores.
o great resources.. shows exactly what i did with my improvised 8 - 16 k map.... specular looks complete changed between 4k and 16k... the same effect i had too with my grid maps.. i need a 64gb graphic card i think
yes i used the pore tiles in the normal map slot.. and the finer grid as bump.. the mix i did simulated what they show on your link