My suspicion is that most of the older guys and gals here who WERE using it to do professional renderings moved onto Marmoset, Keyshot, or the existing game engines. The shader was awesome during it's time, but competition brewed up as the years went on.
Marmoset does render real-time and is great at it, it just isn't a tool to make textures, Quixel is. The two are not exactly the same kind of tools. Marmoset is like Keyshot, rendering stuff. Quixel is like Photoshop, making texture. Kind of. For his hair planes, something like this gives best results from what I have…
@pyrzern what tool did you use for retopo you seemed fast and it really looks good! @fefs the whites you see on the alpha planes are from either - turned on final gathering and ao in viewport 2.0 or if you have a specmap its not black at the uvs of the hair... i had the same problem with my last characters and alphas in…