softening CG hair at the scalp?

Ruz

This has been driving me nuts for a while. I can get cg hair to look 'quite' nice, but where it plants in to the scalp, it looks like a weave.

I could use alpha to make it softer, but using the 'hair info' node with an alpha mask looks a bit crap.

In xgen you can taper the hairs in to the scalp, but you then get these very fine hairs rendering weird

What i want is a nice soft trasition for the hairline. Any ideas?

I did this in blender and as you can see i reduced the hair width at the scalp, but then it just look too thin and renders weird

I could cheat by painting a darker colour where it meets the scalp , kind of disguises it, but its a bit of a hack really

Thinking about it a good alpha solution would be best, but doesn't seem to work very well in blnder using 'hair info '

Ruz

its ok I solved it, although the hair shader itself does not behave very well under differing lighting conditions like having a rim light just messes it up, with random white highlights everywhere

PolyHertz

Give it a solid block of hair and densely layer alphas over that. Along the hairline rim bend the alpha planes so their ends follow the scalp shape for a very short distance instead of directly intersecting it, this will allow the fade out to show without getting the abrupt cutoff.

Ruz

@PolyHertz sorry forgot to mention that this is particle hair, though I could still do that with particles. anyway I think the solution i came up with works well.

dread to think how to recreate the same thing with polys, very hard t pull off