SSE Sub-surface scattering

[cp44]

I wanted to open this up to the community. Boris said in his forum that sub-surface scattering is very unlikely to happen. I'm obviously very happy that he's working on enb for the SE at all particularly with him getting very busy with some important life stuff. I want to know: Is it actually impossible to implement in the SE? If so, is there a possible alternative? If not, what would have to happen for someone to get it into the SE?

[Percephere]

I've been looking at this too. Fallout 4 had some built-in subsurface scattering when playing at ultra settings, but the effects were dependent on the subsurface options in the material files (.BGSM). Skyrim Special Edition doesn't seem to use any of these, so if SSE even has SSS then it would be somewhere in the plugins. I'm not sure SSE has any of the kind, so ENB was probably our only hope. Lacking that, we might be able to fake SSS with slightly glowing skin textures.

Edited November 3, 2016 by Percephere

[DarthSidious666]

Could be possible to write an fx shader file to do this using ReShade, sadly I'm no programmer, but it might be theoretically be possible.

 

As the Skyrim SE engine is between Skyrim and Fallout 4 (call it Skyrim 1.5 if you will)
it won't support the fallout 4 files (obviously).

 

At a guess I'd have a look at the new shaders implemented in Skyrim SE and see if one could be used for the effect as I remember they added dx11 shader functionality to the new(er) engine.

Edited November 3, 2016 by DarthSidious666

[pritster5]

It would be possible to create a screen space subsurface scattering shader but there would be one MAJOR problem. Because the depth buffer can't differentiate between the kinds of objects on the screen, subsurface scattering would be applied to EVERYTHING including metals, rock, wood and all sorts of materials instead of skin exclusively. If someone could make a mask buffer that only shows characters, then we can easily make an SSSSS shader (screen space subsurface scattering)