There are many instances where mapping a file texture to hair is useful. For example when rendering tiger or leopard fur. This requires texture coordinates from the surface mesh.

By default Arnold generates UV coordinates in which the V coordinate goes from 0 to 1 along the length (height) of each hair and, when using the ribbon mode, the U coordinate goes across the width of the hair. The following image is obtained by mapping a red to blue ramp texture.

Workflow

If you want to map a texture across a surface, you must enable the Export UVs on the Hair object and connect the texture to the base_color of the standard_hair shader.

• As you can see in the image below, the tiger pattern is defined along the UV of each individual hair fiber length as well as across the object's surface UV's.