blindsaypatten wrote:Sigh. After setting all the values in your setup, and then much experimentation and adjusting things I think I will have to start over. The tutorial I followed used Simple under Children and started with zero hairs. The hairs were then added one by one. As you can guess I don't have anything like 1000 guide hairs. The clumping seems to work per guide hair so with my limited number of guide hairs the result looks sort of Rastafarian.
Dont start over, this should be possible to fix. Yes, the selected amount of children gathers around a parent, more parents means better behavour of the children. It is pointless to aim for minimal amount of parents as that will always generate to even and unflexible hairdo.
After some practise it is managable to comb a hair with thousands of parents. Your start with a few parents is great to get the basic hairdo, add more and more parents and set lesser and lesser children until they thighten up and become a more natural clump.
blindsaypatten wrote:I should have known I was in trouble when I saw the 75 children. I have to use around 300 in order to get the hair thick enough that you can't see the scalp through it. It's funny though, it looks pretty good in the 3d window, and then awful in the render.
Blender show the children thicker in particle edit mode than rendered. When working on Jennifer's hairdo, I sat the children to display about 20 to give me an idea of how it would look rendering 75. But still alot of testrenders had to be done while combing to minimize bald places.
blindsaypatten wrote:What would be nice would be a way to generate more guide hairs from my set with too few, but I suspect that is wishful thinking.
It is possible to add how many parents you want, and interpolate them to be shaped almost like the nearest one.
Count = the amount of parents added in one klick. Keys = how many keypoints each parent get.
I use 20 keypoints for long hair. You can also subdivide parts of a parent to get more bending keypoints. You can also rekey hair by press W select Rekey.
After learning how particle edit works, I have never needed to reset the hair and start from scratch, I just delete, add, subdivide, rekey, shorten, lengthen in particle edit mode.
If made on a separate scalp, you can reuse and redo one hairdo to a completely new.