Realtime SSS Translucent Effect

3D Model

Was tweaking my upload for a commission work when I came up with this way of doing “realtime” subsurface scattering translucency effect. The effect is exaggerated for presentation.

Note: this was before sketchfab added realtime sub-surface scattering feature.

Basically I duplicated the same head model with a slight face displace as an outer layer. Then flipped the vertex normals but not the face normal so the shading would react with the model in an inverted way. Then set the transparency mode to blend or additive, and used a mask texture to mask out the ear and nose area for the translucency effect. And then set the albedo and specular color to red as “translucency color”. Tweaked the directional lighting shadow bias to set the “translucency scatter range”. Finally added a noise normal map to dither the fake translucency effect.