Very interesting article on how Pixar did the hair simulations for Brave
Has anyone achieved nice curly hair in Blender?
Not even close. Every character I have has straight or wavy hair. 
Found this article by Ben Simonds on hair particles. He actually got some pretty cool results
Another article by Ben on hair particles
the dress cloth in that pixar video looks pretty good also.
At first I felt bad about how lame my work looks in comparison to the big-studio stuff. Then I sat through the credits; I’m vastly out numbered by people whose workstations are worth more than my car.
So I stopped comparing my stuff with theirs. Now I just feel bad about how lame my work looks. 
Hi,
Try child particles. Use combinations of multiple different particle systems, kink settings, wave, braid, curl, shape, radius etc.
Quick muck-around, it’s not exactly but there are some possibilities I think.
My stuff was so lame, I now use blender to make video games and cartoons… :no:
But without the ability for hair to collide with anything, who cares what it looks like?
I suppose its fine if all your doing is stills…
Im curious why the tube team didnt use hair particles for their main character. Early tests showed her with hair, but now she has poly hair. Can anyone provide insight on what led to that decision?
I would guess it has to do with control
polygon hair gets bones-> direct manupulation and animation
If the hair is not too difficult design you can get much quicker results then with a particle system that needs to make calculations for ever and ever.
Also I think Blender’s Hair System is “not quite there yet”? (from what I hear)
While testing I assume they ran into problems.
combine those 2 reasons and I think that’s why it is what it is.
Gilgamesh will have particles hair for sure. This is what Bassam recently updated about the progress in Google+. Polygonal hair is for the animators to get some tweaks and overlaps done or Tube will be having a particular different kind of hair simulation for the end results. Stay tuned! 
I wish I knew how to code forget Pixar for a moment but Disney had some stunning hair and cloth in Tangled and they open sourced their papers. There is a ton of stuff on their site on collisions and contact mechanics. I can understand most of the theory as I did enough physics and calculus in university but I don’t know the first thing about coding nor do I have the time or inclination to learn.
The Sintel crew had a lot of issues with hair and cloth so I am curious to see how the tube guys get along.
Is it still the case in Blender that hair doesn’t have collisions, even with its own emitting mesh?
we need the features of the pixar hair!
blender is unusable…
Endi, this is probably the dumbest place to make your little satirical argument, because without collisions, Blender hair IS more or less unusable for anything other than short fur.
It probably needs a couple more particle layers to get it right, but I got the gist of it.
It was a nightmare to get the hair not to intersect the head, and it involved several invisible force fields and lots of settings tweaking, and that was just for a still. Hair is definitely somewhere that Blender could use a lot of work, but it can be done. I’ll try to make a little test animation soon.
EDIT: Animation is rendering now
Here it is, hot off the CPU. I like the way it turned out for the most part. I’d like to go back and tweak the hair settings and add another layer or two to frizz it out a bit like it is in the movie.
Sure thing, I’ll make a tutorial tomorrow.
Seeing all this just makes me so sad to see how so little of the hair improvements on sintel made it in.
I know that they had problems with their hair, but goddammit it was better than what we have now.
I sincerely hope that the blender character pipeline sees some serious love after mango. Things like hair and cloth dynamics. At least cycles is already slated to get sss, displacements and hair rendering, so there is still progress.
Anyway, im really looking forward to your tutorial! Just saw Brave tonight. Oh my god the hair was amazing. Oh, and the movie kicked ass too. 