Hello everybody,

Once again, I'm trying my hand at generating a better subsurface 
scattering technique. "Better" in this case means faster render times 
and smoother results.

The attached image parsed in 5 seconds and rendered in 11 seconds, for a 
total of 16 seconds render time! It was rendered with four cores, but 
the parsing used only one. (it would be nice if POV used more than one 
core for parsing)

For this image the effect was applied to the pigment, and an ambient 
value was applied to the finish.

The object is a mesh created in LightWave. I used "povlogo.ttf" as a base.

The SSS can use any object type you can trace() a ray at. Parse times 
can get pretty high, and odd artifacts sometimes occur. Flat-sided 
objects look better than rounded ones. Higher samples mean less "light" 
penetration, and longer parse/render times. (this is opposite from other 
SSS techs I've tried in the past)

This technique is based on a proximity (edge-finding) pattern I've been 
developing. If you really want, I can go into the gory details about how 
it works, but I might have a hard time explaining it...

Questions and/or comments are always welcome~

Sam

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