Just an example:

Blonde hair is the hardest to reproduce.  To top it off, most blonde hair textures that come in even the hairs with the best reputations are crappy.  Yup, they're crappy and everybody knows it.  But, what ya gonna do when it's just so dang hard to get right?  Most people fudge it and just leave the fake highlights and shadows on the original hair texts from 3dsk or wherever they got them.  Well, that's a pet peave of mine - painted/fudged highlights and shadows on 3D objects.  You know, that kind of defeats the whole purpose of the "3D" thing, doesn't it?  But, you can't blame 'em.. blonde hair is hard.  So, I'm trying to "fix" that.

Here is a WIP texture of blonde hair about 1/3 of the way done.  (I have to get a seam/UV "guide" made for Radiant Jaguar Hair to finish removing all the unecessary shadows and highlights properly.  ( I dinna built da model.. I dunna know where it goes..)  Radiant Jaguar Hair is probably in the Official top three of "Bestest Ever Hair Models Ever Created In the Universe, Ever" list. (Yeah, it's an Official List.. true story.)

It's not bad for a simple image texture but, sort of bland, isn't it?  (Keep in mind, it is 1/3 of the way done and will look nothing like this.)  Well, it's supposed to be bland.  It's just an image map and a transmap.. no frills.  I haven't even finished making it "blander" so I can get a good finished result from the "rest" of the work that needs to accompany the image map.. namely, the rest of the entire shader tree.  But.... let's see what happens when we add an Out-of-the-Box shader setting from Abacus3d's hair shaders (the light blonde one.)

Tada!  From bland to "Almost-Wannabe-Breck-Girl" using shaders and that bland image map.  There's still 2/3 more work to be done on the hair texture as you can see it's too dark in some areas and too much red is coming out in some areas and too much yellow in others.  But, this is about the lighting and shaders and not so much about this particular WIP texture.

The key point is this:

Morkonan hates painted on shadows and highlights on textures made for 3D models.  I hates them.. I hates them forever..

99.99903% of the problem with blond hair maps is they are cut&pastes of someone's hair and either have the shadows left on them or have them painted on along with painted/fake highlights.  In darker hair, that's not such an issue.  Light is an amazing thing and it scatters differently depending upon its wavelengths, angle, the material, refraction, yada yada yada etc.. Feynman would say it's "goofy that way" but.. whatever.

Hair is translucent.  If you had a stack of iron rods bound together and shined a flashlight on it, you'd see shadows in between the rods but very little reflection and no refraction/scattering/etc to speak of.  But, if you had a stack of glass rods bound together, what would you see?  All sorts of nifty colors, scattering, reflections, etc..  Therein lies the problem.  Most people "paint" that crap on and it's simply "Wrong Headed" thinking.

So, I got tired of crappy blonde hairs and decided to fiddle with it.  The above represents a whole 30 MINUTES! of work in Photoshop and then slapping Abacus's excellent shaders on top of it.  It'll take another hour to finish the base texture and about twenty minutes after that to finish modding the shaders to give good results with the hair.  Then, I'll probably throw in some "effects" for the shader tree to be added for good results with backlights, high speculars, etc.. and see what it looks like.  It'll be better than 99.99902% of blonde hairs out there.

(Lights are mine - crappy neutral IBL with AO, one infinite white main light, one infinite fill/backlight.  The face morph is about 1/3 of the way done as well and so is the texture on the figure - It's V3 Elite Lana text but I'm redoing the face texture and just haven't finished it yet either.. . the story of my life, it seems.. can't get everything finished!. :) )