o4saken wrote:add darker and lighter strokes over the whole thing many times till it looks like hair.
You say you literally paint the specularity onto the plane, right? The result is a pre-shaded wig, not one that still catches different reflections depending on the angles between the light source, the plane normal and the camera, right?
o4saken wrote:..., comb the particles a bit, set background transparency on and render.
Like a sort of projection paint from a render? Like "handbaked"? I already tried it that way, but not as a one-plane-per-strand solution, but rather one plane for all. But if the hair has volume and strands and whatnot, you can't just projection-paint that onto a helmet. In a perfect world blender was able to bake particle hair onto meshes, but sadly blender didn't do that for me. Please, somebody, shout out now and tell me that i'm an idiot and that of course you can bake strand particles directly onto substitute-planes! [...]
I like the concept of the hair as is used e. g. at "hair_female_pigtails" ( i think i ported that wigs from a educational blend from cgcookie). I just dont like the result. It isn't very convincing. Maybe it's just me. Maybe it just misses a translucent part. But being able to dial the color, having only an alpha- and a bump-map, is kind of cool. And it interacts with lightsources. The picture show the best i can do with it, replacing cgcookies diffuse bsdf and others, and adding translucency. It seems as if hair more or less acts like translucent metal...