Inspired by MB's fur image using replication, difficulty in finding specific hair styles and my own cheapness, I've decided to attempt photorealistic strand-based hair without using any programs or plug-ins other than those I already own. Any insight you may wish to share is indeed welcome. So, to start off, I decided to try faking hair first (although I was really going for blue grass with this one). I created a 1024x1024 alpha map (uh-huh, I realized afterward that 512 probably would've been fine), placed this over a blue plane, and replicated this 5,000 times on a sphere. I was only using the color and alpha channels in the shader. Not bad looking, but I must have run out of memory or had another problem, because 42 hours into the render the computer locked up. All I have is this screengrab.

Here's the alpha (resized) that I used. With 19 strands, and 5,000 replications, this equates to around 95,000 blades, although you're obviously only looking at about half that.

At this point, I thought back to Poser's hair room. I stopped using it long ago, as it was always such a witch to render with. But, knowing the speed and quality Carrara delivers, I decided to give importing a Poser file a try. I applied just over 110,000 hairs to a sphere, changed the number of verts per hair from 20 to 10, tweaked the root, tip, and highlight colors, and brought the file into C5. I actually used somewhat higher settings than I did with the previous test, and still the renders finished in under half an hour, (under 20 minutes for the second two shots here). There were not enough hairs to completely cover the sphere, but changing the ball's color from the default gray to a dark blue helped tremendously.

If you don't have it, I think you would enjoy the Anything Grows plugin.

Having said that, what you show here is good learning for lots of replication things.

Nicely done. :)

Thanks guys. I do recall looking into the Anything Grows plug-in; very attractive, especially at the price. I may end up getting it, along with a few other things, later on. Next test, one of the stock dynamic hair presets for James. I increased the total number of hairs to about 80,000. I also applied a skull cap, but the texture on it doesn't match the hair color at all. Looking up numbers on the web, I found out blondes have an average of 140,000 hairs on the scalp, brunettes have around 110,000, and redheads have the least, only around 87,000. http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v141/TerraMatrix/4-1.jpg http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v141/TerraMatrix/5-1.jpg Having said that, I suppose his hair could be a little fuller, at least in the front. The shading also looks a bit odd, almost... I don't know, metallic? I know there's noise thrown into the shading automatically in Poser, I'll try messing around with that, maybe taking it out completely. The hair also intersects itself at certain points, running a dynamic simulation to let it settle into place first would solve this. One thing that concerns me is getting realistic shadows. At this point I see a lot of crappy shadow artifacts along the edges. How can I fix this without using unnecessarily high settings?

Trying out one of the V3 hairstyles by Adorana, default everything. The dark hair color makes it hard to make out details, but right away we can see that the hair needs to be much thicker. Right now she's only at about 14,000 strands, if I remember correctly.

Hair color changed and noise taken out of the shader altogether. I couldn't get the back hair group to be the same as the rest, even though I did change the color. Odd. Perhaps the number of verts per hair should be increased a bit, as it is noticeable in certain areas. I'm not sure if there's a way to edit the hair shader in Carrara. Currently, everything in the texture room is black. Next image, if memory holds out, 140,000 strands.

Sounds similar to my experiences. Believe I increased hair density 10x, hair diameter 0.25 x, render quality pegged....and there's that "quality" slider in the hair controls in Carrara; not entirely sure what it does but values of 60% or more seemed necessary to keep the hair detailed. Getting GI lighting to play with the hair, tho, brought my computer grinding to an almost-halt.

As it turns out, I don't have enough memory to even finish pre-calculating the light for 140,000 strands, let alone render it (for now, at least). So I toned it down to around 70,000-80,000 hairs, and rendered with global illumination enabled. I still couldn't get that one group of hair in the back to change color. You can still see the outline of the head through the hair; I'll have to check to see if there's transparency applied to the hairs, otherwise I'll either try adding more density to those areas or making the strands themselves thicker.

Here's a close-up. The part could be a bit more defined, and (for close-ups like this, at least) more verts wouldn't hurt here and there. Even at highest settings, the hair proves difficult for anti-aliasing. I'm not sure what the dark bands are across some areas.