Your materials and lighting work is very inspiring! I'd second some wallpaper sized renders (Specifically the render of just the lanterns from the previous page).
To bake SSS into a lowpoly model I think you'd have to use Mental Ray with max's Render-to-Texture. These shaders are for hardware rendering only, in the viewport.
no, this is a basic skylight + default renderer, its really nothing fancy at all, the render takes like a minute at most. this is genn's model btw hello verm
add a skylight and a direct light and bake a lightmap to say uvchannel 2. would look better . render the pics with catmull.rom, makes the render look sharper
Finally finished this character here are some final renders, you can check out the other renders on my artstation: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/Po4Bv4
That's true. With mental ray or vray, there is no need for lightmaps or uvmapping a seperate uvsets for that. For a lot of reasons, using these offline renderers are way easier but they take longer to render.