Working With Arnold’s New Standard Hair to Render Fur

Arnold 5 introduced some new shaders that relegated some of the easier versions. Shaders like Standard Surface and a new Standard Hair offers new organizational scheme along with some new capabilities. Lighting TD Arvid Schneider has been covering some of the changes in his ongoing, Arnold rendering tutorial seres. His latest has a look at rendering Xgen fur in Autodesk Maya using Arnold 5’s aiStandard Hair shader.

…how to apply shaders to the groom, setup lighting, and render it with Arnold

Arvid covers some basic interactive grooming, if you are not familiar with using Xgen in Maya. The majority of the tutorial covers how to apply Arnold’s new Standard Hair shader to the setup, create some nice lighting, and render it into a great looking image.

Standard Hair in Arnold is a physically plausible shader that can render hair and fur. It is based on the d’Eon model for specular and uses the Zinke model for diffuse. Realistic results are pretty easy to get right out of the gate, simply by setting a few parameters for the base color, roughness, and index of refraction.