Hair Test

Hair has been causing me numerous problems recently. I knew modelling the hair that I wasn't going to be able to adopt the approach of using lots of alpha mapped planes which is the standard approach for creating in game hair. This was due to rendering constraints within zbrush. So I opted to create essentially place holder hair in the form of solid geometry. This has already taken two separate sculpts to get it looking as it does presently and its still a long way from being good. But as solid place holder geo it all right. My main issue with it is when it comes to the texturing. I've tried texturing with poly paint and using high res hair textures and spot light. Neither of these methods have yielded anything I've really wanted to use. In this screenshot I've just painted strands quickly into lightened areas in photoshop and done some colour correction to the darker colour I wanted the hair to be. This is looking like the most appealing solution right now as it's giving passable results. There would be options I could use if I was rendering out of maya or max but it would require me setting up identical cameras and generally faffing around a lot.