How can I render Skin in Arnold 5?

[lee_griggs]

How can I create a skin shader, now that the Skin shader has been deprecated in Arnold 5.

As this is a frequently asked question we have provided both the question and answer in this thread.

[lee_griggs]

Skin shading is very simple using the Standard Surface shader using Subsurface in Arnold 5. From the Arnold user guide:

“When rendering skin, you would use a Radius color value like R:1.0, G:0.35, B:0.2, indicating that red should scatter deepest and green and blue less. This would replace the three layer workflow for skin where you would make the deep layer red to indicate that deep should scatter with a larger radius. Setting scatter_radius.R to a larger value would correspond to that.”

A video that covers the process can be found here.

[jhonatan.chambi]

Hello Lee, in that video, why not use Normal maps?, i'm triying but nothing happens, skin details only works with displacement maps?

[lee_griggs]

What is your subsurface weight? Try reducing it see the effect and post some renders and shading network if that does not work.