Thanks @poopipe I understand now that lumen is the biggest issue here and I opened this for the first time in about a month the other day and thought, nah... we just need to start over. I'm not happy with the shader, the lighting... the whole thing so yeah, I think I'm just gonna switch off lumen :s
Appreciate the link, but these are hair cards rather than a strand groom. And I think the emissive lighting not working with strand hair is a by product of lumen.
i forget the name of the feature but there's a specific volume shadowing option for hair cards that drops off quite early - there's also a lot of options in the settings for lights that affect when certain features lod out and of course there's the thousand config options you can fiddle with. that said - you're using lumen…