Stanford Dragon - Glass + Sub Surface Scattering

After some more experimenting with Mental Ray I have tinkered with 2 glass shaders, created with the Mental Ray Mia X material. This gave some quite nice results but I still ran into the shadow problem, and trying to enable caustics, which are now a legacy option, and light photons, did not produce any improved results so far.



Both are nice, but the shadows let them down again, the light is not being affected as it should as it passes through the glass.
I also began to experiment with Sub Surface Scattering shaders, after atempting a tutopia in 3D world magazing on SSS i wanted abetter understanding. I focused on 2 ways of doing it with the MILA material, here is the result:

The first uses a basic one layer scatter material, which works ok but still looks very solid.


This 2nd one uses a layered shader, with the scattering on top of diffuse, then two different subtle glossy layers on top, it definitely produced a result with a more depth and detail to it. It  took me a few attempts to figure out how to adjust all the different settings, I found both materials had quite similar setups. 

 Setting the scale was the most important thing to get right off the bat, it really made a difference on how much light was passing through, here the effect is visible on the top horns, and the spines on the back of the dragon.

 Tweaking the layered shader to get it how I wanted was more involved however, as there was more layers to balance as well as balancing the different layers with in the scattering node.

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