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pxgeek said:

Wow, this is just superb! Your breakdowns are a gift...Thank you!!

I love the variety you are getting with your hair brush.

Are you using a lot variations (imm's) or is it just one or two with a lot of tweaking after the fact?

Also, are you drawing the curves on top of a rough hair blockout or no? It looks so clean and precise (like the bun for example)...I struggle with controlling zbrush cruves.

p.s stormtrooper viewcube is a nice touch

It's always a pleasure to help !

So I'm using the exact same brush logic to do all my hairstrands. I say "logic" because I've found two methods to get the same result, it depends on my mood I guess haha. So here it is : 
- Get the curvetube brush
- turn down the brushmodifier to 5, so you'll have 5 sides instead of a bazilion
- add a profile to your curve in the stroke panel, I personally prefer having a big root, then a bigger inbetween close to the root, and slowly go down to a fine tip. But that's just a middle setting that fits most strands starting shape, often I use the inflate on their end, depending on the flow I want to have
- I add a first stroke on a bald head, then split the strand and the bald head and work from the strand subtool
- from here, I adjust the strand with the move brush (using a screenspace pivot for the brush from the picker submenu, this makes move brush less random in my opinion. I also prefer working with AccuCurve on for move since this can give me pointy tips and spikes that helps sharp out the design)
- then I draw a new strand, switch to the move brush...and repeat !
- to preview the result, I activate the Dynamic Subdiv. And to get sharp borders, I simply add creases over edgeloops using the ZModeler
- I often just clone strands I find cool and rework the clone, this can save some time especially on the creasing part of the process

The alternative I use sometime is a brush with a custom curve profile, where I added creases on each side. This also removes the need to delete tip points for UVs, at the cost of having a wavy sudivided end and a harder preview of both roots and strand ends, honestly I prefer going with the curvetube brush, removing tips is not that hard and takes a few seconds, and I like to have a clear picture of the end result ^^

Wanted to follow up and show some progress on this project after a long bout of silence.
Found myself having to do a lot of trial and error with the cloak's detail repetition and making sure I can bake the details to the hood properly before pushing it down like the concept through sculpting or simulation later, but my current major hang-up is trying to get satisfactory details with the robotic arm and making sure everything will rest properly before committing and moving to low poly later.

I've got something of a back-view to the concept that gives more info on the hand design but it's far more quickly made and hastily detailed when compared to details up to this point so I've afraid I'm going to have to be doing more guesswork with this one.