Chaos Group puts Arnold’s alSurface shader in V-Ray

Chaos Group Laboratories’ test render of The Wikihuman Project‘s Emily reference head scan, generated using its new V-Ray implementation of alSurface, Anders Langland’s industry-standard Arnold ubershader.

Chaos Group Labs, Chaos Group’s R&D centre, has released a free V-Ray implementation of alSurface, the industry-standard Arnold ubershader developed by Weta VFX sequence supervisor Anders Langlands.

A native V-Ray version of alSurface focused on skin shading
Developed to extend the capabilities of Solid Angle’s Arnold renderer in VFX production pipelines, and later made open-source, alSurface is capable of recreating a wide range of real-world surfaces.

It’s particularly popular for skin shading – it supports subsurface scattering – which is the aspect Chaos Group has focused on in its own implementation.

According to the firm’s blog post, its version currently takes into account diffuse colour, two levels of specularity and SSS. Refraction and transparency are still absent, but “may be added at some later point”.

Availability
The V-Ray implementation of the alSurface shader is a free download from Chaos Group’s GitHub repo. It supports both V-Ray for 3ds Max and V-Ray for Maya running on Windows or Linux.

Download the V-Ray implementation of the alSurface shader from GitHub

Read a detailed explanation of the shader’s functionality in Chaos Group Laboratories’ blog post
(Includes installation instructions for 3ds Max and Maya)