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Hi Padone,
Here are the setting changes I made from what I understood from your post. I may have not fully gotten the settings you suggested correct. I am using the arm with the new settings and the rest of the body with my original settings.
Scatter and transmit intensity - changed to just Scatter
Dual Lobe Specular weight changed from 0.60 to 1.00
Dual Lobe Specular reflectivity changed from 1.00 to 0.60
Scattering Measuring Distance changed from 0.010 to 0.30
SSS direction changed from 0.30 tp 0.00
Here is the result of the arm: (I also tried applying to the whole body with the same result)
Here I just bring down the Scattering Measuring Distance changed from 0.30 to 0.030
Still way too dark in my opinion.
Now keeping all your settings in the arm but moving the Scattering Measuring Distance back to 0.010 I get a much more pleasing look. I forgot to mention that the SSS measuring distance and transmission distance...all shaders were actually born out of
extreme lighting conditions to help me reveal when there was too much of a SSS effect. So I totally agree with you that you must use extreme lighting conditions to determine how much SSS to use.
That's a render? dang you fooled me there. nice!
@Siciliano1969
As for the scattering distance if you look at the hand in your pictures you can see that a higher distance brings up the sss effect on the fingers much better. Then the skin gets darker because of the increased translucency but that's ok. I don't know the light setup in your scene and it's hard to do tests with a hdri environment alone because you don't have photometric data for it.
Using a strong 50-100 watt photometric backlight in scene only mode is the way to go to test sss because this way you can compare with real lights and skins. You can also get a 100 watt lamp and do tests on your own hand in a dark room to see how much translucency you get. It's also fun and useful to compare with real photos as you say yourself and I totally agree.
In my tests 1 watt = 15000 lumens in iray that's what I get comparing daz to blender lights. That's odd since 1 watt is about 15 lumens for a standard incandescent light bulb so I suspect there's a bug in daz studio using millilumens but other than that it works fine.
Personally I'd go with 0.03 that's your second picture, then the skin tone also depends on tone mapping so you should render your scene with the figure together with some standard rgb checker to get a comparison for diffuse colors. Of course also be sure your monitor is decently profiled to srgb. Below an example.
https://bitbucket.org/Diffeomorphic/import_daz/issues/22/basic-tone-mapping
http://www.digitaldog.net/tips-and-tricks.html
p.s. Then if you can post a scene file with G8F or V8 that are characters I own, I'll be glad to do some tests on your light setup and skin settings if it may help.
@Siciliano1969
As a quick example below there's the G8F where I just thrown in some sss and dual lobe. You can see the difference with the default settings behind her that look more plastic especially in the face and hands where the sss gets more visible. Then again I'm more on the tech side and I have no experience in aiming for photorealism so this is just to get the idea. Scene included.
Yeah, the glowing red fingers and dark arm are totally unnatural. In truth with light that strong to make the finger glow red there would be so much ambient light bouncing around that the arm would be clearly lit.
Hi Padone,
Well with your technical backround you bring alot to the table. Remember that without the coding and the technically minded we would not have these platforms and figures to work with to begin with. As a want to be artist I am focusing on knowing just enough about the tech and backround stuff to make me dangerous with an eye for trying to interprerate and duplicate what I see. Here is the hand you posted and my attempt to almost duplicate it. This is the basis for where I would add better morphs to the hand to make it look more realistic, as well as bump the spec weight and reflectivity up to 1.00 to match the specularity of the hand in the photo. I might try to reposition the light a bit. There is no HDRI lighting just someone in a Cube room with a light illuminating the hand with a back drop. I am enclosing the figure in a room otherwise she would be in the middle of outerspace with an area light (point light set to rectagle). When using PBR lighting and materials you have to also try to create realistic scenes for the lightrays to bound around in.
whee i did render that hair full sized. it only took 5 hours (at which point it was still noisy but the skin was good enough that I could clean it up using blenders denoiser controled by a depth mask so it only denoised the incredibly noisy background)
did i mention that this hair uses a full gig of memory? literally more memory than all the textures combined
I also posted the instagramy version which probably does a better job faking "real" but #aestetically I just prefer cleaner renders
look at that hair you can now see interacting with the hand - try that with mesh hair
also I realized I'm using my eye trick where I dont worry about the eyes because we cant really see them. jcades tricks for realism: blur the background so you cant see it close the eyes so you cant see them... maybe the solution is just to render all our characters in windowless rooms with no light no need to worry about sss settings then :)
also this is about as far as I've been able to push realism. I still dont think it hits real, but also not sure what I could do to better fool the viewer so constructive crit is v v welcome
This is fantastic work J cade!
@Siciliano1969 That picture looks very good to me. May be it needs some care around the nails that are too "perfect" as well as the fingers shape that may benefit from some bone variation especially in the nuckles. But overall I feel it could pass for a real photo well enough.
That is not a good example of sss though since it's more ambient light with no strong direct light so sss can't "shine" in its glory. For sss tests a clear daylight environment or a studio environment with strong lights is better. Below is a good example of real sss where ambient light don't come into play so backlights alone are responsible for skin shading.
https://pxhere.com/en/photo/867439
Then the picture I posted is a standard rgb checker to test diffuse colors that may help with tone mapping.
This is awesome. Good job.
I think that is a perfect example of SSS that you posted Padone...of course I will try to replicate it tonight.
My picture was just to illustrate my thought process of using a real reference to check my overall CG results. Having someone say it could pass as real or almost real is the ultimate compliment and helps me validate where I am at. Probably some of the toughest critics are us in the CG world. 
Mille grazie!
This is my try after reading the discussion of @siciliano1969 and @padone
The light setup (with some tweaks) provided by https://www.daz3d.com/brilliance-iray-lights
@Paintbox It looks like you removed the displacement maps entirely. I mean there's no sign of reflections that I'd expect especially on the lips and around the eyes and nose areas, may be some on the neck too. Also the hair looks a little "painted". If you are using the denoiser beware that it smooths things out and may produce this kind of effect on details. For high quality pictures it's better to avoid the denoiser and let the image converge.
There's a strange shadow in the left corner of the eyes, unless it comes from the hdri picture itself. The shadows are very sharp, it looks like you used a point light without any shape. Real lights tend to produce smooth shadows because of the light shape, even on close subjects. Also I'd try increasing the sss a bit but that's the last of the issues there. As a little final note I don't like the dark background, since you use a strong direct light with a medium intensity environment light may be a pale background will contextualize the subject better.
Again I'm not an expert on photorealism, I'm sure others will find better advices.
This are very good advice, I will see what I can do better with your pointers! Thank you.
Ok here is the picture from Padone's link and my attempt at coming close to the SSS using my skin shaders with no change in skin shader settings. The figure could use a bit more adjusting of the hands and I had to put her in an actual airplane cabin to get things to look more correct. The only thing missing is the outside lighting playing a bit on the face and hand. Proof of how important you have to simulate not only the lighting but lighting enviroment your figure is in. I didn't nail it, but I think I'm in the ballpark. There is still a lot of noise and probably would have taken hours to resolve. No gotta no tima lika dat capici?
https://pxhere.com/en/photo/867439
Nice job paintbox! I think Padone is correct in the suggestions. Add more HD morphs or displacement and no denoiser.
I'm fairly proud of this one, and the skin shader in particular.
@Siciliano1969 I believe it's pretty close as for skin settings and light environment. In the photo the light scatters more on the palm but I suspect it's from the light direction rather than the skin settings. I believe it could be useful for sss testing to include the ear in the picture as in the reference photo.
You can see the thumb is a little "overtranslucent". But this is because the uber shader gets a true volumetric solution to simulate sss, instead of a sss dedicated shader. This means the whole volume is simulated and since there are no bones inside then it may get more translucent than needed in some areas. I believe this effect is limited to fingers though, since luckily ears get no bones and the rest of the body is too thick to get bones in the way.
Nevertheless I guess some little "overtranslucency" is better than a "limited" sss that would make things plastic like.
p.s. The fact that the uber shader simulates the whole volume is also the reason why it is so slow to converge as for sss effects. Other solutions such as cycles use a better denoiser that doesn't burn details, and a dedicated sss shader that simulates the sub-surface rather than the whole volume.
a test render. but can you tell just by looking what it is I'm testing? (if you can that would be good indication that im doing okay)
oh also @emoryhalberg
In this render and your last couple the lips in particular have stood out to me as very realistic
This is 100% exactly correct in my opinion! I will try to include the ear in the render this time. Since bones are less translucent than skin and my figures does not include bones it makes the hand a bit overtranslucent. Luckily most renders do not need to have lighting situations where maximum amount of SSS is tested like in the reference photo.
Here is an updated version with the ear Padone. I tried the Denoised version (I am not a fan of the DAZ Iray Denoiser) but I wanted to get a general idea of the SSS in this lighting environment. The reference photo shows a young girl with her hand and head near an airplane window in the early morning at sunset. The sun appears from behind the plane. What is missing in my render is the outside world, horizon, and ground creating a bit more GI in the cabin of the airplane and through her window. The bones in her hands are missing thus creating a bit too much translucency. Its amazing how you have to recreate all these factors to get the most accurate results.
@jcade @Siciliano1969 Just to let you know that your input got me to improve the blender dual lobe and roughness specularity to better match with iray. Thank you.
@Siciliano1969 Thank you for updating your render. Those skin settings and light environment look very good to me as to mimic the reference photo. Nice Job indeed.
https://bitbucket.org/Diffeomorphic/import_daz/issues/130/better-dual-lobe-and-roughness-specularity
Thank you!
I'm afraid I'm not sure what you're testing, j cade, but I think it has to do with her nose?
Siciliano1969 and Padone, thank you for your testing. So far I've had better realistic results with chromatic rendering, especially with the guide from isidorekeeghan.
Siciliano1969, do you have the Iray Skin Manager? If so, would you mind uploading your skin settings?
That is an impressive render. I think, her nose is great as it is.
I think personal properties should not be confused with sculpting errors. That's when it turns into cherry picking. Not everybody has the perfect model nose.
So I think, her nose is fine. It's just her.
Lovely render, how many iterations? Also when rendering on gpu always make sure that around half a gigabyte of your vram is free otherwise your render will be slow, also dont render in closed boxes, have atleast one side open. Also hair renders slow no matter the type, because hair has too many layers or strands and light has to bounce off of each one of them therefor makes the render slow ,one way to speed it up is to lower the max lightpath (to 10 for example, remember default is 21)
Another lovely render, the hair looks dry ,as of no moisture or oiliness dry.
Very nice renders.
Nice job, espacially on the legs, feet and the shoes
Good job, maybe give my method a try? Its on page 34
Very Good, now add a little bit of tear and a dramatic theater like light and its complete.
Are you testing lower translucency values mixed with higher glossiness? Lower translucency makes the skin dry and higher gloss doesnt fix it, but it sure does make the details pop and it works great for mimicking dry lips or feet.
Why, thank you!
no one guessed eyes :( which I guess might indicate I still have work to do
(also I def did leave the spec a bit high)
hopefully the comparison between these more clearly shows improvements:
I've always had problems creating a system that consistently worked for eyes. Much like the translucency maps the actual textures themselve have a great deal of variance in their setup so a 1 size fits all solution is problematic. Add to that irays thinwalled off creating unfortunate shadows. and the G8s uv setup making it nigh impossible to avoid harsh seam lines in the bump on the eye moisture and cornea (I have a whole semi-coherent rant written down).
So my solution has actually ended up being rolling my own textures. I have a flying spaghetti monster of nodes in blender for a fully procedural eye setup that I can tweak and bake out.
Thanks Padone!
Great work on the dual lobe! I know I learned alot on this thread about that. I have to start messing with Blender a bit more.