Hello all. I’m currently (after long hiatus) returning to my blender animation project, and am testing various hair approaches. I wonder at this point what methods (specificly in blender) people have used for hair. This is short hair, so I don’t need colision detection or fancy dynamics- but if anyone knows how to do that in blender, I woudn’t mind hearing it. I also hear there is a grass generation script and a cloth plugin (based on topix) for blender. Either of these work for hair? My python experience is limited at best(so far, all I’ve done is modify the unwrap pluging for meshes with mixed tri and quad patches) but I can learn more if that is the way to go. (I kinda want to learn it if armatures become pythonable, anyway)
Any ideas? I’m interested in hearing any approach, however ‘hokey’. My animation is intended to be semi-foto real, but not realistic as such (the characters are cartoony) so funky approaches that yield unreal but interesting results might be cool (ala max headroom, for instance)
B.
There is also a hair python plugin available, it’s pretty new and not that good though it gives fairly dcent results.
You could also try modeling some hair and using the cloth plugin to animate it (not sure if this will work).
I am sure there are other ways aswell,… but I’ll let someone else come up with those 
Thanks Kib_Tph
where can I find the hair plug? I’ve got a holiday coming up, maybe I’ll have time to try it.
If the results are good, maybe I’ll try submitting to the gallery
I am not sure,…
It’s been posted on the forum recently
found it! its at:
ftp://ftp.3dforhire.com/blender/RipSting/hair.zip
the grass plugin is also there- I guess they are related. When I have the time, I’ll try out some furballs to see how far it gets.
B.
ah coolski,
be sure to show your animation here 
I don’t think Topix will work with hair though, but you might get it to work for cloth. It’s a bit unpredictable, so be careful as it can crash Blender.
Martin
I dont know if this helps but for fur i have used halos:
I have seen your teddies on the blender.nl forum! really like them. I might use halo hair (I have done some tests on spheres that look sorta like your teddies) or just opt for a shaven head. The halo material hair is nice for short fur, or crew cut, but not for long/medium hair, or for dynamics.
Alas I’m not a good enough modeller/texturer to do the “ray tracy” method.