hello
i’m amazed with @ndy’s snowman animation. How did he do these hair ??
They are not made with FIBER, but ther are PARTICLES - yes?
So, how?? HOW do i have to set the particle material to do so realistic hairs?
HOW???
thx for help 
first: they are static particles, which have been used for [static only hair] until now
second: the mesh is a subsurf mesh [so the particles will update]
thrid: it is all in the material settings, there are several things you can do to modify the color so the particles all don’t look the same
What I can’t figure out is how he made them look tapered.
They seem to taper at the ends, and even seen to “clump” together like real fur.
I would really like to know how he did that.
Could it be the particle emitters are deformed by a lattice and then dupliverted on the mesh?
… my words 
ok, I can get smooth hair but I still can’t figure out how the particles look grouped or clumped together or to taper at the ends.
It looks like the particles have an attraction to eachother and clump together at the ends.
And for the taper, the plant made with static partile shown in the “How to make shadows with static particles” tutorial on blender3d.org has tapering leaves and I can’t get anything like that.
Do you know what I mean?
the tapering comes only from texturing of the halos. the 2.0 documentation describes the texture settings needed to achieve the effect. check it yout here: (scroll to the end, section “Static particles”)
http://download.blender.org/documentation/NaN_docs/Manual2.0/Particles.html
to my knowledge there is no way do define clumping. what @ndy did however is a texture trick to generate a motion/waving effect. read this post (same link as fligh %'s post)
https://blenderartists.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=28101
marin