Hello,

how about marrying polygon hair and strand based hair?

There is plenty of polygon based hair out on the markets, and it is complex and has a lot of styling. It lacks good shaders / textures, they often have a lot of burnt-in specular and are not very realistic. 

Some of the polygon hair items may be suitable for the following approach. I noticed that often, the same maps are used for all materials. The uv mapping is often done such that the hairs in the texture maps are eith parallel to the u or the v gradient.

If one could now obtain the uv mapping from this polygon hair, grow strand hair on top of the polygon hair, and direct the guide hairs along the u or v gradient, such that the guide hairs essentially follow the polygon hair surface. Then the strand hair would cover  the polygon hair to a large extent and could provide the appearance (with the texture maps of the polygon hair still in the background to avoid bald spots).

Don't know if this would be too complex to implement (and if it would look good at all, given the guide hairs have been positioned as described).

 

Best regards,

   Michael