When using subsurface scattering some shaders like 3DelightMaterial offer a choice between Ray-Traced (the default choice) subsurface scattering and Point-Based SSS. This article helps you being informed about pros and cons of each.
Pros of Ray Tracing SSS (default)
Ray-traced subsurface scattering has major advantages over the point-based version:
- It can compute single scattering effect in addition to multiple scattering.
- It can resolve subsurface light transport on thin geometric details.
- It doesn't need any pre-computation and works well with progressive final frame rendering and IPR.
- It is easier to get light blockers inside geometry to have interesting volume shadowing effects.
- It has a much smaller memory footprint.
- It works well on scenes of large scales - a big problem in the point-based version.
- The overall look is very close to the point-based version and can be used as a drop-in replacement.
Cons of Ray Tracing SSS
- At lower sampling counts it produces more sampling noise than the point-based version.