It's easier to sculpt than dynamic hair, but a bit heavy on the poly side. I just wanted to know if Firefly can render it and if it's looking good. This render is one light with ray traced shadows and IDL, and took about three hours on my machine with moderate quality settings. I'm thinking about having a simple proxy mesh for ray traciing to speed things up, but I don't know if the hair will still look right. 

Opinions welcome.

Looks like she just woke up.  Three hours?  Maybe on the heavy side where poly's are concerned.

Looks interesting, the hairs could use some more polygons, though (upper left looks a bit polygonal to me). How many polygons are this, actually?

If using a lot of polygons in a small space, like here, do not forget to lower the shading rate for the object receiving shadows from your polygons (the head, in this case). This can reduce the heavy aliasing of the shadow on the forehead. Or try to use depth map shadows, which look better anyway for aliasing-heavy scenes, in my opinion at least, because of their built-in filtering. (Yes, i am aware that depth map shadows are not much liked, just worth a try if you cannot get your shadows dark enough :-)

How much time of the 3 hours did it spend in precalculating IDL, btw, is it worth it?

The hair is half a million polys. Quite a lot. 

If you don't use IDL and won't use ray traced shadows, the render needs only a few minutes. Ray tracing needs a lot of render time, actually.

Is it worth it? I like to have believable lights in the scene, and this difficult without IDL, AO and ray traced shadows.

And yes, I could have styled the hairs a little bit more, it's not really a great hairstyle. The question is if it looks believable. 

Looks similar to some strand based hairs I've seen. I tried doing something like that with 3dsmax once. My computer couldn't handle the render though. Don't know the poly count.

What kind of texturing does that take. Do you need to use the hair node or will it take normal shaders, image maps even?

I liked the hair

You'd need a really high-end powerhouse to render an animation of that, with physics thrown in.  For still images, probably do a 2D paint-in for similar effect.  Frankly, it's not a stylish hairdo - pretty scrubby-brush looking. I am sorry, please do not take these as put-downs.  Just my opinions.  Carry on making hair, and enjoy !

Needs work.  IMO it looks like what I think I remember dynamic hair looking like or mpre accurately if you just photoshopped it with a one pixel brush.  Color looks slightly on the purple side to me. Specular seems all wrong.  Clashes with the realistic character.  The hair isn't laying natually.  Density is wrong in places (periphary).  I can see harsh bends.  The top part looks like a stack of propped up needles more than hair.  Shadow settings are off.

Simply put this is something caught in the uncanny valley. 

Why not try something simpler like her eyebrows, a male's facial hair, pubic hair, eye lashes, etc. and slowly work your way up?  This would have probably worked better off for a first try as a buzz cut, flat top, mohawk, you know, something simple.  Another option would be going with the older transmapped hair for your base and then using lots of little strands to make it stand out a little better, maybe add some thickness and depth.

 Cool! It does look like dynamic hair. RE: Winterclaw- "REAL" mesh eyebrows? fantastic idea!

She looks like she has spagetti on her head.