and I'm wondering what you guys think the result of baking the highpoly hair clump to the planes would be. what comes next? I use xnormal to generate normals/base texture painting in zbrush/ao. It would be easy to retopolgize each 'clump' of hair seperately by just extruding the edges of a plane out along the hair and just beyond the tips of the clump. Played around with this for a bit the other night which resulted in several subtools of clumped together hair strands which look pretty much exactly how I would want the hair to look if I was using hair planes. and then pinch the roots (slightly, only to group them a bit) and then really pinch the tips to bring them together. This way you can edit the mask to paint in any connects / fix any errors, and then inflate. Otherwise you may have to break the alpha pattern into smaller peices and drag them on as a mask with radial symmetry.

why not make a strand, duplicate it, move it around a bit, duplicate, move, etc. This way you can load the alphas in photoshop, position them exactly where you need them, and then preview the result. So I was originally leaning toward sculpting the hair for this creature, when I thought. I like to see it while sculpting in zbrush so I can get a better idea of the final result. I'm generally not a fan of using alpha'd hair.

I'm working on a Troll ceature for a baldur's gate mod and I finally got around to starting work on it's hair. but let me explain what I'm trying to accomplish, if I can. I know the title of this thread sounds ridiculous and you're probably thinking 'What the? WHY?'.

Zbrush alpha