StrikerMunc: Thanks! I spent a couple of days exploring different hair setups, and this to me one captured the essence of what I wanted to portray in this character. Eve was inspired by the same named person in the book of Genesis. She is reaching up to the tree of knowledge here as the serpent suggests. I have more plans for her. She’s bodily complete, but for future works I want to refine her based on initial feedback received in this thread. It was also a means to work more intensely with the new hair system’s curve guides.
BgDM: Thank you very much BgDM. I agree about the lips. Moving the rig around, I see a couple of the envelopes of the armature segments are extending into that area, so when I move the head, there’s some unintentional deformation there, as is true of this still. The mouth looks normal (and the chin is not so low) when everything’s in rest position. I will be reworking the rig for future use of this character though, along with some of the other elements. I also want to start creating some shape keys for her expressions.
Hippie: Thanks Hippie 
The hair is a separate mesh based on the head mesh, and once separated I assigned it to be a particle emitter. I created a number of curve guides that wrap around the head and use a limiting distance so each curve guide only attracts a portion of the particles. Each guide has to be placed carefully, as when they overlap the particle strands can go in unpredictable and undesirable directions. The eye brows were also derived and separated from the main head mesh and made into separate particle emitters. The same goes for the four lids (not as visible in this shot). Each emitter has its own settings and forces. Opposing forces (x/-x, y/-y) help push the particles in slightly opposite directions, with regards to the eyebrows, so they look more natural and less jumping out of the skin and therefore unnatural. I should also say that I scale/place the emitter meshes within the head mesh (and then parent them, along with the guides, to an empty or a head bone so they move with the character as they’re being posed). The inward mesh placement of the emitters helps the hair strands look like their coming out of the head rather than starting on the surface and then going up and curving. Curve guides are also placed partly in the head. It requires a lot of tweaking and experimentation to get the results you want. To speed things up so you can edit the results quickly and more easily, set the particle Disp setting to something like 50 percent or lower, or start with a low strand count (like 5 or 10 thousand) and then increase the head hair upward as necessary. For the eyebrows I think I used around 250 strands each. Render time can be massive, and Blender can crash if you try to render too many particles in a dense scene, so save often and be patient
mzungu: Thanks! I agree about the eyeball specularity; it could be higher yet. The tree was in there for several interpretive possibilities, not just as the Tree of Knowledge.
rubbleman: Thanks for commenting! I consider her one of liveliest and most challenging character creations. This isn’t her best angle, but in this shot she is not meant to be beautiful necessarily. She is a pretty woman, innocent yet verging on disobedience, about to make a fatefully bad decision, as the story goes 
I’ve been pretty light on the post work. I still prefer to go without that wherever possible, but I realize there are certain results that cannot be achieved without it and times where it is simply more practical to do things in post. It’s a continuous learning experience for me, but you know I will keep trying to push further with it all.
levi: Thank you very much levi Don’t let the render times discourage you though. They can easily be cut in half or by more, especially during test rendering stages, simply by using lower hair particle counts. Once I reach a certain point in a project, past the halfway point maybe, I prefer to test render at near final resolution and full everything (subsurf, OSA, AO, area lamp or spotlight samples, etc.) since I try to bring everything to the final result I have in mind for any given project. Extra RAM helps tremendously and benefits the entire OS (and the harddrive, which then has to experience less virtual memory swapping in the event of low RAM). Thanks about the splash page too. It is an honor to be associated like that with both the software and community I care for tremendously.
RobertT
