DisneyFan: Thanks for the link! That was useful reading, and pretty close to what I had worked out for myself and discussed with Dizzi. I don't need to see any files exported from LuxBlend. It's enough to know that they use cylinders and spheres for hairs.

Now I need to decide if I want to duplicate their hack for a quick intermediate solution, or go straight to a polygon-based version (and maybe nurbs in the future). I think I prefer the latter, even though it could end up a tad slow. I might not match their 40000 hairs per minute that way, but maybe I can achieve 10000.

I hope someone will remember the idea of adding a hair primitive to Luxrender that was mentioned in that thread.

-- I'm not mad at you, just Westphalian.