Making a realistic shader has never been easier with Arnold render. The surface of a paper can react similar to a mix between a translucent material and a subsurface scatter.

In order to create a paper shader start by importing this paper frog model (link to download here) into Maya o 3ds Max or any other software package that supports Arnold. And switch to Arnold render as your render engine in your render settings.

Create an aiStandardSurface shader and apply a white Base Color. (photo)

Reduce the specular weight to zero since we are not making a shiny paper. this will prevent the paper to have glossy reflections.

Then to simulate the light spreading in the surface increase the subsurface weight to 0.3. you can increase this value if you want to scatter the light more in you custom scene. Also change the subsurface color to a beige to brownish color.

Finally one of the most important things: In the geometry tab check the thin walled parameter. this will tell Arnold that the object is not solid but a shallow surface without any internal structure. you can find more about this parameter in the Arnold documentation ( https://docs.arnoldrenderer.com/display/A5AFMUG/Geometry ).

Finally you can add a custom paper texture to the base color and a displacement map too.

add a file node to the base color and add the texture included in the demo file. (photo)

To add the displacement go to the Arnold shading group in the hypershade and in the displacement map parameter add add the displacement texture included in the demo file.(photo)

You will notice that a displacement shader is created automatically. this parameter will control the amount of displacement the geometry will have trough the Scale parameter. In this case I used a scale value of 0.025 but you can increase or decrease this as your will.

Finally we have to subdivide the geometry at render time to do this, select the geometry, go to the geometry tb in the shape node, then to the subdivision tab and select the subdivision type to catclark, then change the iterations to 2. If you want to know more about adding displacement maps please don’t forget to read this short post(link.)

I added a light setup and a camera too, you can see that by including a strong back light it makes it evident the scattering of the light trough the surface giving it a cool effect. (final render)