Here’s a screenshot with the viewport set to rendered, children display set equal to rendered compared with the output I get when rendering! Am I missing a setting? I have tried turning up curve subdivisions and my step setting in display is turned up as well.
Braidstest.zip (253 KB)
Try increasing the path steps:
Thanks for your helpful reply! That certainly did it - for this problem. While I have your attention - what about strand render, adaptive render and B-spline? Do those checkboxes also apply to cycles, and when should I use them? Does this render steps setting work with the curve subdivisions number, or are they completely separate, as in do they need to be the same or be turned up close to each other, or does the steps number take precedence or is more important?
It is my understanding that adaptive/b spline etc… are for Blender Internal only. I could be wrong though. And I don’t know how curve subdivision works. Sorry.
When I first looked at your file I though I was seeing a bug. I also didn’t think what you were trying to achieve could be done with such low segments. But there it was rendering in the viewport. Then I thought that you had changed your render settings so much (I’ve never seen some of those configs) that you had somehow overridden something. But I imported the sphere (Scalp) into a test scene of mine and everything behaved the same. The only thing that tipped me off is that it seemed impossible to be getting so many curves from so few segments and I just thought, we need more steps here.
Also on final renders you should probably set the cycles hair rendering mode to ‘smooth’ from ‘true normals.’ You may have done this one purpose to keep the scene rendering quickly. Good luck.
Thanks for all your help, I really appreciate it. I was following broadstu’s recommendation that the steps in ‘display’ controlled the rendering as well, and I don’t know if that was changed later or more likely I misunderstood (originally he even said ‘draw’). Obviously it makes much more sense this way.
I wonder what render settings you might be seeing that were changed so much? I have not messed with those for a while, was it the clamp? The max bounces? Any tips in that dept. are also appreciated!
I guess It wasn’t so crazy after all. ‘Correlated multi jitter’ just gives me that warm ‘I have no idea how blender works’ feeling. And the viewport rendering was paused which threw me off for a sec. The bounces seem pretty high. So I guess it was a good, Jack Nicholson kind of crazy, and not a creepy Amanda Bynes crazy. 
Your braids have given me some new ideas to try, as I mentioned I didn’t think it was possible to make those style braids this way. I had been trying something similar but with massive segments, and hand styling, but it doesn’t play well with hair dynamics, and it’s a pain to make. I think this will work.
Are you just messing around with hair, or are you planning a human model with braids?
Just practicing! I have only recently upgraded to a system which will even do hair although rendering times are still absurd in terms of animation… Braids just seem like something that is almost impossible to style by hand and they came out so pretty. I am working on giving several of my models cornrows and it seems terribly easy - until render time, of course.
