the Clump valor in the hair particle system is very important, as you can see on the images below. The actual clump settings for the hair creation in blender is good, but can be improved getting additional control. Actually in blender, in the case of using a texture or vertex group for clump control, we are in fact, just controlling the amount of it. My proposal is to get the possibility to control the amount and the size at the same time with that hipotetical texture map. You can see what I mean in the basic fakes images below. I really believe can be a good improvement.
hm to implement such a thing it would be cool to have something visual like a curve option. + you get more variations
currently to get the proposed clamp shape, you would have to change a few sliders…
could you post an image how your texture idea would work on this?
A reminder of what actually exists.
Clumping size is a parameter that does not exist in Blender.
For Interpolated children, Clumping radius is always relative to parent editable path or to a virtual parent.
We have Parting options. That does not work with virtual parents.
But your mock-up does not seem to be limited to that. It seems to also confuse children density with hair clumping radius.
I am not in favor to mix and confuse 3 or 4 settings.
It is better to have distinct settings that you can tweak individually.
So I would prefer to have new settings like children density, clumping radius for virtual parents.
And then reuse the same texture or vertex groups to influence them instead of a tool that confuse everything and reduce possibilities.
It will be great to have the possibility to convert childrens into guide curves.
Support Goosberry if you didn’t yet, there will be many hairy characters and certainly hairs will be pushed further than this single proposal…well, if only people wake up and start subscribing of course…
Many thanks for the response, after seen your video I have experimented parting settings with no satisfied expectatives. My proposal actually is not mixing current parameters of hair creation, so I’m not proposing sacrify anyone. As you say, Clumping size is a parameter that doesn’t exist in blender. So my proposal would be adding a new one, just subordinating it with a current one (and only in case of using texture maps or vertex groups). Fact that for me means a way to facilitate the work. But anyway, as you have commented, adding the children density parameter could be the great solution, satisfying my perspective and the lovers of hundreds of parameters to play with 
no offense
+1 I like it, I actually think Blender could use that Curve settings in more options, especially forces. There where a couple of other places I had in mind recently. Where it would be better to get a visual curve, and easier to edit than values. I think it was somewhere else in hair/strand particles when I did a monkey face.
This is a interesting idea and would be good to be analized, but really is not the focus of this thread. Here we are talking about the clump valor of hair creation. The idea is how to improve it, maybe creating new parameters like “clump size” or “children density”, specially when using texture maps or vertex groups.
I would like to post a new example. If we want to make the same hair of the following image in blender, we can’t. We can get a similar result, but not the same. The reason? because currently we can’t determine how many children we want for each clump, so blender give the same quantity for every one, regardless of its size. If you observe the image, you can see easely how each clump have a quantity of children absolutly related of its size. So…If we wan to play in the first division we need to solve that, getting something like “clump size” or “children density”
You can the effect with multiple hair systems. In fact… you can pretty much ONLY get usable hair in Blender with multiple systems. I agree that more options are needed. Psy-Fi has an aim of getting more Yeti-like control in place for Gooseberry. Likely not the node-based system, but the other aspects.
rhyging5, your last image is really more meaning full.
From what you pointed, I think that we need:
_a “Parting Radius from Particle Length” option to avoid current limitation of thick short lock / thin long lock.
_a tool to control clump shape. At least a curve widget in properties as in myclay’s post. But it could be more elaborated tools in particle mode.
I would like to be able to control it per particle keys. It could be simple values like radius we have for curves.
Imagine that you simply had to select a key in Particle Mode and do alt S to puff volume of related children.
_A value to flatten and a tilt value could also be added to a key in order to thin tweak a lock.
Other thoughts about hair particle systems :
_In particle mode, it is not well known but edit mode tools like Bend, To Sphere, Shear can be used on particles. Maybe it deserves a Tab.
_In particle mode, we have a mirror tool. Imagine more tools like that. I think of a duplicate and snap.
The work flow would be to comb a particle, duplicate it , move the duplicate and then, just make it grow or shrink.
Imagine same thing with a spin tool or an array tool.
_ We can add a lattice to a mesh and it deforms mesh and hair. Maybe a lattice option could be added to only deform a chosen hair system.
It could be simple way to animate them through lattice shapekeys.
_ A separate tool in Particle mode could help to create derivative hair or fur. On the contrary, a join hair systems in one tool could help to simply too complex setup.
_ Displayed children can be converted to curves. These curves can be converted to mesh. And mesh can be used as an emitter for hairs. But again, we have no way to simply convert existing curves to combed particles or to create editable combed particle from displayed children.
I think that could be more simple than that. Just adding a map for children density. Take a look on the sketch. As you can see, we could get a similar result of “lorax” image, just combining some texture maps. Tell me if the sketch is not enought clarifying.
about hair collision, agree absolutly more tools are needed
More tools for shaping fur are indeed needed.
In particular,procedural tools(like clump is),for fur work.
There should be a way to clump like in the first example,and also not only spherically.
Blender has a really powerfull tool for giving forces to fur,the texture force field.
The problem is that it doesn’t use the uv mapping of the object,so controlling the forces are practically impossible.
We need a way to displace on the tangent space the direction of the fur(from the uv coordinates).
And the interpolation of children particles should take the normal direction into account(it’s really annoying to have 2 different particles system for front and back of the ears)
I understand that this thread is mainly for clump(and an improvements is welcome) but the system needs much more work than simply fix clump.