Okay, I feel like I'm getting reasonably good results with skin rendering (thanks to Bagginsbill's VSS, in particular), but I'd like to take the next step and get the hair rendering quality to line up with the skin quality. Does anyone have a really good tutorial or two to recommend?

TIA!

Hmm...
Most of the time, no matter what you do, the hair will always look fake.
That's not anything to do with the render settings, but with the textures of the hair, with the way the mesh is done, the transparency etc. (not necessarily all of them at once, but if one is not up to scratch, it will let the render down.)
I find there are very few hairs out there which render realistically.

There are ways to improve hair renders, but I think you'll have to adjust the settings on each one individually, because they are vastly different in setup, unlike the underlying figure for the skin.

But hey, I could be completely wrong. :)

You could try painting the hair instead of using a hair figure.

i think the problem is always  the specular. hair has bright highlights. but it looks very special. its very hard to do it.

I almost always use strand based hair. Transmapped hair is troublesome; it's pretty hard to get realist gravity results. Strand based hair calculated against a low poly proxy gives far more realistic results.
For strand based hair, setting up dark hair colors is fairly easy. Setting up a good blond color, however - I haven't managed to do that yet.
An advantage is that the specular highlghts appear where they should - they're not painted.
A drawback of strand based hair is resource usage, although with Poser Pro on a 64 bit OS with a decent amount of RAM (8 GB) it's not as troublesome as it used to be.

As for painting hair - I haven't seen an image yet where the painted hair didn't somehow clash with the rendered skin, unless the skin was also heavily postworked.

Thanks, all... sounds like there really aren't any great tutorials. Google wasn't much help either.

I've had decent results with darker hairs - dark brown, black. Light brown, blonde, most reds... not so much. And the hair is usually much more realistic at the scalp than in long locks. Curls, well....

I've definitely seen promo renders for hair where I wouldn't be satisfied, myself. But OTOH, I do see some promo renders that indicate I could be getting better results if I knew better what I was doing. And sometimes, an artist gets a far better render than you would have thought would be possible with a given product. I can't believe that's all postwork.

As far as vendor promos, see DigiCalimero's WildHair (which, admittedly, I don't own). A better example, since I own both the hair and the textures: Firebirdz's 5 Muses for Clio. Most of those renders are incredible... you can tell it's not a photo, but it's very good. From the same vendor, see also In Love Again for Sapphire Fox. Absolutely amazing stuff....

Not quite at that level, but I'd also rate some (tho not all) of Breeze's Dream Collection (e.g. Olessa) promo renders very high.. much better than what I'm usually achieving, at any rate. Certainly, quite a bit of plus3D's promo work.

I don't think I've got the patience for strand-based hair (and am already feeling burdened by render times)... and I have to admit I'm still pretty skeptical about it. Could you show some realistic examples, svdl?

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/index.php?image_id=1832944&member

Next for me is the actual image maps used.  Do you need to use realistic photos? Not always, but they do tend to give the best results.  Take a close look at your own hair.  Tho you may be blond or brunette or a redhead, you will notice that there are actually many many shades in your hair, and that one strand is rarely the same color from root to tip.  For realistic colors, photos are just the easiest way to achieve this.  Transparency maps are very important as well, and really the only advice I can give on those is they take practice.  A lot of models come with very good transmaps to start with.

Shaders.  You can really make or break a hair with shaders.  And not every hair should take the same shader setting, again it's going to vary on the model.  I like to go for a low intensity specular setting set fairly large.  I usually start with a specular value and highlight size around .3 and adjust from there, that gives you the soft look.  i then use the alt specular node with some anistropic plugged in to get the shine.  A little bit of translucence and a good bump and you are on your way with the shaders.

Lastly, render settings.  It does no good to put all that work into shaders and textures if you arent going to show it off with a good render.   I know a lot of people like to turn shadows and raytracing off on hair to save render time, but you will nearly always turn out a very flat looking hair in comparison to leaving it on.  Also turning down your min shading rate will bring out more detail in the hair.  If I am looking to really show off a hair I will turn it all the way down to 0 most of the time.  I'm attaching a Screenshot of the render  settings i used on the linked render to give you an idea of what I use that seems to work well for me.

Thanks very much, Lillaanya! From your post, I see that some of this is going to come back to shaders... VSS has been a stroke of fortune, since Bagginsbill has some very good pre-settings in there for skin.. but I'd be pretty much flying blind otherwise.

I don't skimp on render settings.

Maybe I should try it with a blonde texture and see what it looks like.

I asked a similar question recently and was pointed in this direction.

http://www.runtimedna.com/mod/forum/messages.php?ShowMessage=143845

I liked the results.  :) and it's a great start.  Olivier uses a skin node in the alt diffuse and it's the sheen of that which makes the highlights. 

Good luck.

Indi.

Thanks, indigone! Will take a look.