Hi Brad.

Glad that you found our dA gallery. Amethyst/Kim is now handling the Social Media presence so thank goes to her for the great job of spreading the word. 

The secret to make hair more realistic is to break the surface. Since the hair prop is not made of individual strands it naturally lends to be rendered as a solid surface, which gives the "helmet" look that you mentioned. 

Hair is fairly glossy, see all the shampoo commercials, so you want the glossiness/specular color to be fairly high.

Then you need a good bump map and crank it up, way up. I generally get it around -0.004/0.004 or around there with strength at 100%.

Hope this helps.

Paolo

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