I just thought I’d pop by to break the radio-silence and show some epic skin stuff that’s been happening lately.
A couple days ago, Brecht surprised us all by adding two additional falloff options for the SSS shader, as well as giving it bump/normal map capabilities and texture blurring, and Thomas also finished his work on SSS render passes (sneak a peak at the 2.69 release notes while we make them here)
The video above is an interesting combination of talent. Shortly after Brecht originally added the SSS shader, Matt Heimlich (a co-cycles module owner) created a monster node setup that mimics Arnold renderer’s renown skin shader abilities. A little while ago, Kent Trammell tried out Matt’s shader setup and that’s the video above :)
So I think it’s safe to say that the only major features missing from Cycles now is volumetrics (clouds and stuff). Sure there’s some other nice-to-have stuff, but if you think about it, nothing else is really a major feature (who cares about baking anyways)
For me first mayor feature missing in cycles is texture baking. Super useful in game development. Imagine baking lightmap on environment, baking procedural materials created with noises and OSL, super fast ambient occlusion on game assets, pre-renderin backgrounds for animation and much more…
I don’t do any game development, so I don’t care about baking so much ;) I can understand the need of course, though apart from GI and OSL textures there’s not much you can’t just get from blender internal renderer. Sure, everyone want’s GI in their games, but light map textures aren’t dynamic so that’d be fairly lame in my opinion.
Not that I’d throw a tantrum if it were added, but given the needs of the average cycles user I just don’t think it’s as important as volumetrics .