Working With Arnold’s Standard Surface for Realistic Skin

Taking some time for you to get used to the new Arnold shaders? Arnold 5 added new shaders to work with, depreciating the old ones. They did so for a good reason. LookDev and lighting TD Arvid Schneider has shown some shader building with his weekly MtoA tutorials. Continuing with this theme, Arvid has a look into using the new Arnold Standard Surface for creating realistic skin.

There are some notable differences between the new standard surface and the old standard shader in Arnold. For the most part, though, it has the same functionality as the old shader. If you are used to using an AL Shader, the new surface standard doesn’t have distribution modes when working with SSS. The results however really speak for themselves.

Arvid shows us how to setup a realistic skin shader using the aiStandardSurface shader using the digital Emily asset from WikiHuman.