Is translucency really necessary for Iray skin shaders?

mmdestiny

This may be more of a critique of some products than it is of translucency in general, but with proper diffuse mixing, on a lot of products' skin shaders and depending on your scene you can turn off translucency and get the same appearance with a significant cut in render time.

Do you ever find yourself turning packaged translucency off on character products?

I know I turn it off almost 100% of the time on fine hair surfaces because of the ridiculous amount of "sparkling" it can generate.

/rant

Matt_Castle

... yes, it's absolutely necessary for a good result. The subsurface scattering effects that are needed for skin to light well from all angles are dependent on either translucency or refraction to allow light beneath the surface of the model (use of cutout opacity disables volumetric effects).

This is not to say that you couldn't have completely opaque materials if one wants to go for a stylised effect, but the results are definitely not identical.

 

Richard Haseltine

You might well be able to drop it on some characters, depending on lighting and distance from the camera.

Linwelly

I would say it depends very much on what you render, for a close up with defined light (like a spot light) coming from various angles you want to have translucency in the skin. For a group of characters you look at from a certain distance, for light settings with rather diffuse light coming from all directions (a rainy day HDRI) you can turn it down. It will safe you a lot of render time to switch it off and you wont loose much detail

kyoto kid

...you can also make adjustments to the translucency level to lighten or darken the skin.  Some character also have several preset settings for translucency.