I know this isn't a Carrara-specific topic, but I really want to hear recommendations from Carrara artists like you who know what we have to do to make things look good in our renders. I've been playing with PhilW's awesome portrait studio set and discovered I don't like most of the hair I have for extreme closeups. My collection looks good for general work, but aren't detailed / natural enough for really zoomed-in work. So can you guys recommend a few hair props that look good for this type of work? Please include whatever info you can such as what it's called, who made it, where can you get it, what is the hair length etc. Thanks guys!

is this transmapped hair or Carrara dynamic hair?

Both have their uses, so either will work...

Is the goal to avoid using post?

Then I would probably recommend adding dynamic hair - starting from scratch or modifying existing styles either sold or the ones which come packaged with Carrara itself. I am not sold on the way trans-mappped hair looks in extreme closeups. Some styles (e.g. this one: https://www.renderosity.com/mod/bcs/lua-updo/98898/ ) can serve as base and good background/shaping prop for adding dynamic hairs to the hair model object. This way you can get away with adding very few dynamic hairs and being able to significantly up the segment count and rendering options without killing your resources.

But in most cases I'd just fix things in post...

Great idea! I never thought of adding dynamic hairs to a transmapped hair prop! Sounds like I'll have to futz with the shader a bit to get the color to match, but shader tweaking - what's new in Carrara eh? LOL! Yes, I'm always seeking to have the final image as post-free as possible - but in the end if you have to jam something out quickly, postwork is usually the only way out.