joepal wrote:This actually made me understand why my previous attempts at making hair usually ended up looking like haystacks.
Would you make a tutorial on how to create haystacks in Blender?
Seriously: These two tutorials are exactly the needle in the haystack, the missing link. They tell you what other tutorials don't tell you. Thanks for the link. Now I also need reference images.
I would like to add another link to a cycles hair tutorial you most probably already know.
http://www.blenderguru.com/tutorials/how-to-render-hair-with-cycles/ is a bit outdated today and it only deals with materials and render settings. Some stuff changed in the mean time, but it explaines some settings very detailed. Not the usual "set this to 0.02", but what it does and how. It especially explaines the shape setting and tells you never to use solid colours for hair, but a texture. (There's no such thing as a solid colour in real world. Real world is noisy.)
Another interesting thing I discovered a few weeks back is
https://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Extensions:2.6/Py/Scripts/Objects/HairNet. This addon converts meshes to particles. I gave it a try with the long hair that ships with MH, more precisely the top layer of strands.
It looks quite promising when rendered.
Ignore the fireflies in the image. Even this quality took more than 30 minutes. Completely OT: Can GPU rendering now be used for particles and if so, is it faster than CPU?