Welcome to my hair tutorial. In this I will try to explain the techniques I use to create hair in my images.

There are a lot of hair tutuorials out there, and I would highly recommend looking at them as well. Links can be found at Renderosity in the tutorials section and elsewhere. Because I have not had the chance to sample every single hair tutorial that is available, even though I mostly devised these techniques on my own, some of my methods may be similar to those already presented by others. I am not claiming to have been the first to invent any of this. I am just trying to pass along what works for me.

Okay, having said that, let's get started. There are basically three ways of doing hair:

1. You can render it as part of the image, using transparency maps and such to create the illusion of hair.
2. You can add the hair after rendering by drawing it onto the rendered image.
3. You can do some combination of the above.

In this tutorial I will be concerned mostly with the second and third methods, as I have not been able to achieve good enough (for my eye, at least) results using method #1 alone.

The image on the right was done entirely by rendering with transparency maps. This was my first serious attempt at 3D art, and I worked for weeks making one-of-a-kind models for the hair strands and then carefully applying texture maps.

The result isn't bad, but to me it doesn't compare at all to the results I got with the image on the left, which was done by drawing the hair post-render. I was also able to produce this image much more quickly, at least so far as the hair was concerned.