Its not lame if you dont know you dont know. A little tip that ctbram shared with use is to turn of the two way light in the lighting panel, then normal facing the wrong way will look...

Its your normals are facing the wrong way, select object go to polygons, normals then click on reverse............dave

The fast skin shader work on the volume or scale of the model so will look different on each model, you need to get each layer working there was a free tutorial on the gnomon workshop web site you...

Have you got a screen shot so we can see whats going on...........dave