Hi all,

Im going to be starting a project soon that will take quite a long time for me to finish, so it pays to get as well prepared as possible for it :-)

ive developed quite a good set of figures to render via interposer in c4d and everything is set up really nicely for importing and rendering them BUT ive never liked c4ds SSS system, even though my experiments with using have improved, and i do love posers use of SSS but im loathe to render them in poser as the materials system is slow and cumbersome and it will take months of converting if i do decide to do this, 

the obvious reply is render both and comp them together in post.

I havent really used poser fusion much or the load poser scene in interposer, if i set up a scene in poser,how well will the lighting positions and camera settings be transferred? if at all? also is interposer able to send a scene from c4d to poser? (which would be a lot less hassle in my case)

just wanting to get some options before i start slogging and half way through find out a better way

I just have to ask, what is it about the SSS you don't like?  What's inherently better about the Poser SSS that we don't have in C4D?  Curious minds would like to know.  Is it just that you like the renders you see done with Poser SSS better?  Or is there an actual limitation you are speaking of?  The SSS shader in C4D r13 and higher, to my knowledge, is the same type of wavelength-based BSDF solution found in some of the best render engines in the world, like Vray and MentalRay.  The more accurate and realistic material would be BSSRDF.  I believe Vray and Arnold, for example, support this highly realistic scattering shader system, but most others are BSDF.  What's Poser using?

Just for kicks, here's the Siggraph 2013 paper, and slides, describing how the developers of Arnold renderer got importance-sampling BSSRDF method to work without any pre-computation, for fast rendering of very realistic human skin in animation.  Just in case you're interested in that kind of tech stuff.  This is the best skin shader in the industry today.  We can get close to this using Vray SSS2, but I doubt Poser is using anything as advanced.

https://sites.google.com/site/ckulla/home/bssrdf-importance-sampling

Check out some of the renders at the very end of the slides.  The humans in a couple of those look absolutely convincing.

i DO like the look of the skin renders in poser its just everything else it renders i dont like haha

i think its because EVERY time you set up a new scene in c4d you have to go through loads of previews to get anything like a decent result, it takes to long to render for me, in poser once you have loaded the figure and everything you just hit render and in a couple of mins its done, in c4d just on normal settings it takes over a minute just to stop generating the sss cache

i suppose it will be something like in poser its relatively confined so the sss calculation must be pretty much similar so i suspect it will be heavily optimised.

i am trying one last time to do the face/skin renders in c4d but i am not optimistic there is relatively little in the way of help and ive read as much as is available 

"i DO like the look of the skin renders in poser its just everything else it renders i dont like haha"

I recently upgraded my poser from poser 6 to poser pro 2014

I admit I have not even having bothered to try out the sss rendering in poser pro

as I don't consider posers firely rendering system a viable one for production animation rendering in HD.

To say nothing of the lack of any ability to send My camera & other 3D Data to After Effects CS.

Having said that, the STILLS I have seen from poser are fairly impressive in the area of subsurface scattering on skin

.

I attribute this to poser utilizing python and its internal node based shader system along with poser figure skin shaders, optimized from the start, for that particular render engine.

One of the few limitation of a Poser to IPP/C4D workflow is that there is no viable way to convert poser native Node based Shader system to C4D.

In most cases you are are better off building shaders from scratch in any rendering

system( C4D,Vray,Mental Ray etc.) if you want to take full advantage of its native render engines capabilities and effects.

I realize I am not offering any solution to your dilemma 

but it seems your options are limited  in this respect. 

Well, it might be more helpful if I knew what type of sss Poser was using.  I'm sure it's no different than our system.  I don't think it's the advanced method of scattering being used in Arnold.  Looking at the results of Poser's SSS, it looks very similar to the softness and shading in most of the C4D examples I've seen around, like the one being shown on this page:

http://www.photoshopdaily.co.uk/news/maxon-cinema-4d-release-13/

And here:

http://www.cgmotionbox.com/2012/04/cinema-4d-r13-faster-subsurface-scattering/

Notice the deep scattering, backscatter in the thin parts of the ears, and redness in the gradient of the shadows.  This is multi-layer effect of BSDF.  There are some techniques to speeding up SSS in C4D. I personally don't use it much, but I'll see if I can find some of my info on that.

I should also have pointed out, the scale of your scene definitely impacts how the SSS will turn out.  You should be assembling your scenes using real world units, and modelling or importing things to real world scale.  SSS is a physical material, and depend on some realistic physics and calculations to be correct.  I'm sure the Poser SSS is measured to whatever the possible scene standards are in that software, but it's up to you in Cinema4d, to ensure your scene is set up properly for SSS to work as exepcted.

If you're getting unexpected or unusual results, this can be a cause.

yea i will have to put that to the test, i have had no need to know what size everything is yet but like you said,it will be interesting to see what happens regarding sss render when everything is set up in c4 to realistic scales

Hi Just FYI the "poserverse" is microscopic

compared to to other software packages

,some 1000 times smaller than C4D for example.

to be honest ive given up for the time being after spending an entire day fiddling about with materials and lighting etc i was getting to a point where i was liking what i was seeing, something was niggling in the back of my mind, so i turned off the sss and guess what? there was a microscopic difference and my render time went back to under a minute! so after pulling some serious self control out of the bag (not throwing pc out of window or smashing monitor to smithereens) i decided to forget it. as it stands the time it would take to import all the materials into poser and get them to a point where i like them is just not worth it,  

i know it seems like a gigantic waste of time but thankyou for all your comments people they were appreciated