lowpoly hair - how would you do it?

Bombshell

I've made a deal with someone on youtube, I will be making them an avatar to interact with their gameplay commentaries.
My Problem is when it comes to the hair I'm stumped.
The head is 286 tris so its pretty low poly it has a general head shape, and the triangles are well distributed, no huge or tiny tris, thats how I want it, it looks fine. But then I gave my try at hair, I want it low poly to fit in with the style of the head. But the hair to get enough definition in the shape of it (with tufts and fringe, etc) its not even 2 3rds done and its a higher tri count with horrible flow of triangles.
I've googles like made but I keep getting directed to tutorials about using hair shaders and particle system hair and etc.
So if anyone could give me some help, tips or something about poly modelling hair I'd be very grateful.

Thanks in advanced,
Bombshell.

EzMeow

http://wiki.polycount.com/HairTechnique?action=show&redirect=Hair+Techniques

You should find what you need here.

Josh_Singh

This is pretty much the standard way to do it:
http://www.paultosca.com/varga_hair.html

Bombshell

the way I wanted to go about it is modelling it as a solid mass, the avatar is toony, I've already experimented with that style of hair and it doesn't quite fit.
Think of the xbox live avatars like so,

System

Shouldn't be too tough.

Start by extracting the scalp area to form your basic shape, Shell or extrude it to get some thickness and then just shape it out. To keep triangle count down, just use separate parts to create any bangs or tails etc, there's no reason to keep them as a single mesh (unless you're doing something much higher poly, those XBox Avatars for example look like they're using quite a few polys).