Quote - > Quote - 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%.

How do you break the surface, and would a normal map do instead of a bump map?

Opacity... many of the hair sets I don't like have horride opacities that seem gradual.  Rather than sudden.