You could just brute force it and convert it to geo I guess? 
Seems manageable for eyelashes, especially if you’d want to sim it at some point.
I could, but I need it for full blown scalp hair as well, which would be pretty impractical. Plus it’s hard to “groom” geo hair without warping the strand thickness.
Makes sense. I didn’t get into geo nodes yet, it’s still changing too rapidly.
Hat’s off for having the patience (and the skills of course) to achieve such high level results, and thanks heaps for sharing the process - fascinating to follow.
I myself gave up in Blender when it comes to grooming, everything else on the market is far more evolved.
Fingers crossed the next open movie is gonna have loads of hair and fur in it.
You can use the Particle Instance Modifier (you can instance from the hair particles), and apply the material to the instanced geometry.
That won’t allow grooming/shaping the hair though, will it?
me too i find a bit of a PITA, we also need improvements on the hair grooming, and adding dynamic materials, and more stuff as like in standard software in the future soon…
yep unless you “groom” on a 3d curve and convert them into edge loops and add skin modifier and subdiv, and apply and select similar in edit mode and select all the tips and scale them with proportional editing, but that’s just a little idea, it might not work lol…
i think geo nodes could help you, try to seek some tutorial, that should be possibly easier to setup, setting that should but i am unaware of its procedural texturing capabilities for the purpose you want…
hey also you can convert hair particles into geo btw, but its heck heavy operation if i recall i attempted that once and got freezed or non responding blender…
but the problem with that is that you wont be able to animate/simulate it later since its a mesh, unless you use shape keys or something like that (nah that sounds like a waste of time, hence is time consuming)
nope it only instances the object i think… grooming its a thing from hair particles mode only, likely…
It references the hair particles. The modifier can bend the instances along the hair particles.
@MichaelColina Yeah that does sound a bit convoluted and restrictive… I’d be more inclined to stick with hair particles and wait/hope for someone to make them properly texturable.
@kkar Ok I might look into it in that case. 
Meanwhile I’ve found another way to make it bumpy: add a little bit of random roughness to the strands and increase the path steps to 10 or so.
I don’t expect that would be practicable for hair much denser than eyelashes though.
Very interesting stuff. Did you came up with anything in the end?
We had a kind of similar problem: We had to fake some tattoos over the hair strands at work not too long ago (as if you would put a sticker over the hair). It was maya, but the same principle applies here I believe. Hair Uvs didn’t allowed us to place the sticker directly on top, so we ended up using the helper geometry’s uvs (not the scalp, but the one that was the base mesh used to do the hair, was actually rigged for animation and controlled the hair deformation) to place the stickers where we needed to. It is not a very clean method, but it did the trick. It wasn’t meant to be rendered out directly with the hair pass but to use it in compositing, but I think you should be able to make it work inside the actual shader, and it would respect the deformations even using object’s coordinates.
did you end up figuring this out? i’m trying to deal with a similar project myself, and this is the only post i can find on the subject.
Hello! I think the first answer on this stackexchange topic could help you get what you need. It creates uv coordinates for the curves without converting them to mesh. It even gives solutions for the different types of curves cycles can render.
I hope it helps.
Cheers.