Arnold Realistic Hair with the alHair Shader

You’ve create a great hair groom for your character. Now comes the task of shading and rendering hair to look great. Sometimes that can be easier said than done. Hair has scattering properties, as well as unique coloring and specular properties that can be tricky to match. If you are using Arnold, Anders Langlands’ alShaders has node called alHair.

alHair is a shader specifically built to make hair look great. It is a dual scattering multiple importance sampled hair shader.

Arvid Schneider covers rendering realistic hair using a spectacular Xgen groom created by Sohrab Esfehani. Arnold will require curve ID’s provided by Maya’s Xgen. Curve ID’s will give you a unique identifier for each fur strand. This is simple export from the Xgen panel.