I took the skullcap I made and subdivided... found out that Vicki and Stephanie are roughly the same height, so I just had to tweak a few values and it fit fine on Vicki, so I did tests. This skullcap sloooooooooooooooooooooowed my computer down soooooo much. Only 4000 hairs, no widening of the roots. What I'm finding is that the hairs all start from the same point and then split apart, which is crappy for hair you want to pull back, because unless you bangs, it'll look like thin receding hair.

And here's with the hair pulled back with the shadow maps at 256

Same hair, down to 2 lights both at white, and a shadow map of 800. Notice receeding

So I thought if I took all the bang and front hairline areas and subdivded that even more it'd solve the problem... never got to find out. My computer lagged so much it shut off for a good 20 minutes. I need more RAM.

I think your on to something, though. Higher poly (vertex) density on the edge, and lower in the middle. If your machine struggles with it, perhaps you can post it to freestuff for someone else to try.

Hi yes this works :) to reduce the load and give the full thick hair apperince. the hair onder neith mearly becomes a volumiser. So use fewer hairs underneith and just enough verts to get the bend you want. the only draw back is that you can only relay use hair layed out this in styeled mode, or you end up with thins spots and uneven forming when you run the sims. what i have found to work best is to run a high dencaty part/scalp line make the hair short just long enough to merge with the longer lower densaty flowing hairs for the simulation. set the lower fewer hairs up so they fall and add to the others they meet this plus the scalp line thick/many short hairs gives a very plush thick look with much lower drag on comp resorces. hope this helps Laters Vel