You can’t ask blender foundation to make hair as good as Pixar’s one before Pixar tries to improve it.
If you read fxguide’s article. Hairs simulations were a nightmare for Pixar’s artists, too.
2.5 brings a lot of hair improvments compare to 2.4.
Even if collisions were easier in 2.4; it would not be so easy to make beautilful curly hair in 2.4X.
Using wind force fields did not give terrific results in 2.4.
Oh i dont expect any package to compete with pixar. Im just simply hoping that bf refocuses their efforts towards a strong charatcer pipeline once mango is finished. It needs a lot of work. That being said, you can still get a lot done as things are now, and im looking forward to learning more about how to get blender hair dynamics to behave. 
Been a bit of a busy day, but I’ll get cracking on the tut as soon as I can
Scrapped the tutorial I was working on because I decided that i could do much better than what I showed on the last page. Getting a test render ready to show right now. The scene is destroying my 8GB of RAM though. Expect some shadow artifacts until I can figure out a way to optimize the deep shadow buffers or get more memory.
EDIT: Here it is
It looks thin because there’s a whole layer of hair missing which makes up the bulk of the mass. I can’t get a render at a reasonable resolution with it yet, still testing how to get my memory uses down without sacrificing too much detail. I’d love to hear any ideas.
m9105826,
That looks tremendous. Please make the tutorial or blend, if possible. Thanks.
That looks really promising 
Looking wonderful! Great work! I too, am very curious how to get the RAM requirements down. How many hair strands are you dealing with?
EDIT: Not to get ahead of ourselves here, but have you managed to successfully make the hair not penetrate the mesh, or make the hair behave more realistically? The hair in your earlier quick test was a bit too stiff and springy.
In any case, your progress is awesome so far!
How’s that tutorial coming along?
I WILL NOT FORGET! Your examples looked too damn cool! 
Sorry everyone. I’ll post a blend in a bit. Truth is, I’m still doing tests to try and get reasonable results. At least as far as memory goes. Anyone have any advice?
EDIT: Figured it out! I’ll go over what I did wrong in my tutorial.
Can’t wait! Thanks for the update!
Alright folks, hopefully I can start work on a tutorial tomorrow, would everyone prefer a video or text tut? Also, here’s a preview .blend. It’s not the finished one as I’m still goofing around with the outer two layers of hair tonight, but it should be enough to get some of you started. Feedback is more than welcome.
http://www.pasteall.org/blend/14857
Keep in mind, you’ll need about 2.5 GB of RAM just for Blender for it to render properly. If it’s not working for you, try lowering the resolution of the buffer spotlights or lowering the b-spline segments on each particle system. Keep in mind, both will fairly drastically lower the quality of your render.
The render should look similar to this if you just open it up and hit f12.
It may be a little different as I’ve tweaked a few things, but it should be close enough.
Looking great! I’ll put in my vote for a video tutorial. I look forward to what you come up with.
Thanks for all your efforts!
Thats all the ram I have lol.
That last render looks incredible 
I tried it and it rendered great 2:41 Looks very, very good. Now experimenting to see how it blends with a poly mesh to see if; the particle hair will augment the mesh in order to scale back on particle count and computer load.
What a nut roll it must have been experimenting and building in all the modifiers! I looked at the outliner list and it’s an intensive, extensive list of all the physics and modifiers that went into the hair.
Hahaha okay okay, I suppose I can let the cat out of the bag. I’ve been at work on a series of tutorials not just covering hair in Blender, but the creation of an entire character from scratch including modeling, texturing, material setup, rigging, animation, cloth setup, and object interaction. Needless to say, it’s been taking some time. I’ll do a quick text-based hair tut in the coming days. Sorry for the long delay, I haven’t forgotten.
did you remove the preview .blend from pasteall? it’s only giving me a .php file for some reason
