wow, amazing looking! Were any animals harmed in the rendering of this? ;p
Greg, does that tiger fur use the same node setup as your curly hair?
It’s fantastic!
I have nothing against “Random” input for strands, it’s ok to have, but it would be similar computation like noise texture, it’s almost same thing, so speed will be very similar… Procedurals aren’t slow in Cycles :P, we have modern computers, they usually ad 1-2s for rendertime and they have very, very, small memory footprint, not like image textures.
In mho better than a “Random” input is a “threshold” input value, what it does is masking a percentage of hair .
Blender allready has this function(for parting and noise),but it’s not usable in the rendering.
If this worked in rendering you could easily create gray and white hairs for example,simply as a mixing between 2 colors(with the threshold value as the masking mixer)
I see a lot of exciting test renders happening here!
Finally found the time to play around with Cycles’ strand rendering myself (my apologies for the horrendous video quality). Thank you BroadStu for this brilliant patch! :yes:
amazing result!
The obligatory question:
Render time?
Wow, nice character and rendering.
For further renderings, I would suggest to close his ears. You can see through his head.
Well hes missing brains thats for sure. When he turns around there’s a split second where you can see light through hs ear… Hes goodlookin’ though! 
Yes, really, really nice :).
Can you show your skin shader in cycles??
@BlackClaw: Everything’s broken down into passes/layers but the scalp hair clocks in at about 7 min per frame at 540x540 resolution. Facial hair pass at 2.5 min/frame. Not the fastest render time but after comparing to raytraced strands with BI, I can’t complain. No doubt the patch will be sped up over time.
@Conz3D, ejnaren: Good catch lol…if I do anymore rendering with this head, I’ll be sure to cap those ear canals.
@MmAaXx, Alain, Manolo76: Thanks guys! It’s really the hair patch doing the beauty work. So much easier to setup than BI strand rendering :yes:
@DcVertice: The skin shader is BI which I explain in this series over at Blender Cookie. I’ve tried messing with the Ray Length SSS hack but can’t get close to the quality of BI’s SSS. I’m quite anxious for true SSS to be implemented with Cycles 
Really nice test theLuthier! What’s the hair shader look like?
please forgive the spaghetti setup :spin:
The musgrave texture controls the overall brown with grey streaks. To blend the skin color into the scalp, I use that texture to color the base of the strands. Also there’s a touch of translucent bsdf toward the ends of the strands.
the Luthier great result 
Well done!
+1 for the hair shader
EDIT: Wow you were fast Thanks a lot!
That looks amazing, nice job! A shame that youtube just butchers the video though eh
This is so freaking awesome! I am officially in love with hair now. Thanks, thanks, thanks, thanks! May I humbly introduce my first three tribbles…
