Animating with Blender

Subsurface Scattering

While Blender’s subsurface scattering render is very fast for the high quality it generates, you need to be aware of how it can affect the overall render time on a typical short animation project. Each material that uses subsurface scattering gets it own render pass, regardless of whether the object is seen in the final render or not. Once again, each of these renders is fairly quick, but that time can begin to stretch if there are many shadow casting lamps or if Ambient Occlusion is used.

As an example, in the Beast’s kitchen each of the dishes on the shelves and the cups and saucers on the counter used subsurface scattering to achieve a nice thin porcelain look. It looked fine, but I found that in many shots I was watching ...