I've been making my own hair, which uses my own idiosyncratic texturing with only one textmap and a lot of glommed on procedural effects.  In looking at the thread about procedural irises, I wonder if hair strands could be done that way, too, without any texture maps at all.  BagginsBill's iris has nice strands, which could presumably be made to run lengthwise instead of radially.

But, here's my thought.  If all the components of the hair are "flat mapped", to take a texture with straight hairs drawn on, no custom curving (kind of like Maya's free hair), I would assume a shader could provide a nice solution to the problem of hair texturing.

Does anyone have any ideas on this?  Hints for creating strands?  Has this been tried before?

giscard posted some "hair-for-All" shaders in his deviantarts gallery.  they might be a good jumping-off point.  http://Giskard.deviantart.com/gallery/ 

I think you would still need trans maps for it to look right but a linear texture should be fairly easy.

baggins bill did do a hair setup that could use a gray scale map that could be changed to any color and would shine like hair....

thread:
Attempt at reducing Koz hair speculars in P6
http://www.renderosity.com/mod/forumpro/showthread.php?message_id=2660693&ebot_calc_page#message_2660693

I think that helps, thank you!  :)

I wonder if/how trans-mapped edges might be fudged.  Hmm.

Quote - I think that helps, thank you!  :)

I wonder if/how trans-mapped edges might be fudged.  Hmm.

It could probably be done but it would depend heavly on the uv mapping of the object

Ooo... I love Giskard's Pinstripes I'll have to grab these and the rest of his P5/P6 nodes stuff. Seem's he's been busy since the last time i visited his deviations.

The trans could be a gradient combined with the linear ellement?

I used to have a great texture of straight hair that worked on all the hair I had with poor texturing but I have lost that "Universal Hair Texture".

*"The trans could be a gradient combined with the linear ellement?"
*That's kind of what I was thinking, but the edges would need to be rough, not smooth, and better-defined than I assume could be created with just a gradient u or v node.
 
Hmm....

It seems to me that any shader network that can produce a set of hair-like lines - that output could be "flattened" color-wise with some math to make a transparency map, i.e. any place you have a hair line is ceiling'd to 255/255/255.  Non-hair areas I'd expet to be zero (transparent) right?

I would probably try something like that with a colorRamp node, yes.  

But how to handle the tips, where the shader shouldn't run all the way to the edge of the mesh, but should have each strand ending irregularly?

I need to stop surfing and fire up Poser to test some of this....

Had you looked at the Hair node at all?  I don't quite get how you're figuring to do this, but I think the Hair node may be applied to the areas that are not transparent the same way you're trying to pop out a transmap.  I have no idea how that would look, as I've never actually used the Hair node on anything except Hair Room dynamic hair.

It's been awhile, so I don't remember what the results were like.  I tried using the hair node along with a transmap, back in 2005 when I was developing the current shader I'm using.  I didn't like the results and actually ended up integrating a velvet node into the shader, instead.  But now I've decided (belatedly) that the results aren't very good.  Hmm.

I think maybe the problem was that there were pronounced differences in how the hair node shader rendered in Firefly vs. P4 render mode.  I tend to do a lot of renders with the old P4 renderer, because I am perpetually behind the technology curve and my poor 'puter is slow to Firefly.... 

If you need to slap on a seamless texture to a home-baked hair mesh, try to make a texture for yourself using the Hair Texture Maker (Java version):
http://natukin.hp.infoseek.co.jp/kami.html
(please note:  japanese page)

I'll try the Hair Texture Maker.  Thank you.

Well, BagginsBill's shader works better for me than the Giskard stuff, but BB's can't be fully implemented because Poser 5 lacks the HSV node.  Perhaps as a result, the specularity is too strong and it looks pretty bad, although this may also be due to the quality of my homemade hair textures.  The 3d texturing by Giskard produces some really ugly distortions where the x/y/z scale settings come into conflict, if and when the mesh curves around too much from one axis to another.  It also doesn't seem able to deal effectively with mesh elements which need strands to run at an angle, rather than being axis aligned.  I think strands for this may need to use a 2d procedural node, but I don't think Poser has one that will pull it off.  Hmm.  And my experiment with trans-mapping effects worsened matters significantly.

Apparently I'm not skilled enough with Poser's materials room to pull this off.  Perhaps it's possible.  Perhaps I should try learning BagginsBill's materials program....