It is composed of static particles that are textured to have several ‘hairs’ with transparency (=strands)
It seems that the textured strands exhibit extreme artifacts - no antialiasing (?), and this seems to create very ‘sandy’/noisy fur instead of smooth shiny strands of hair. Any way to make this better?
Hmmm… I’m afraid I wasn’t able to get anywhere with it. I wasn’t able to get the artifacts to move or scale, either, which strikes me as odd. It’s almost as though each emitted group of particles is being textured as a block and the coordinate system method of the texture mapping isn’t being applied to it, the way it would apply to the mesh.
One experiment I haven’t tried yet is to set up a mesh with a huge number of vertices and emitting a very small number of particles from each one, instead of the other way around. That might really bump up the render time, but it might give you the control over the texturing of each individual strand that you’re looking for.
I tried to set up a new blend, and made a material for the particle mesh that had an alpha of zero, then I added a Blend texture without a color map and applied it to the alpha, and I did get some more even fading across the length of the strands, so you might try that and see what comes of it.
Well… its defo wip…