Got the Starting Scalp!

I haven't been able to read much this week, so I'm going to stall by showing some pictures of the starting scalp that Cat sent me. Of course, right off the bat I noticed that the scalp model had too many polygons to be a good starting point for me. However, this made think about the advantages and disadvantages of starting with a low-poly scalp vs. a high-poly scalp when "growing" control strands.

The 2 Options:
(1) start with a low-polygon scalp with a control strand for each poly face (this leads to sparse control strands).

(2) start with a high-polygon scalp with a control strand for only certain poly faces (this amount could be controlled by a percentage variable).

Pitfalls:
1: (1) doesn't allow much control over hair placement or length [if I eventually implement some kind of color map to grow control strands with different lengths, then more polys implies a higher resolution, more precise "length map"]. In addition, if higher hair volume or more control over the hair is desired, new control strands can only be created by interpolation between existing control strands (costs computation time). Also, (1) requires some extra steps (see below) before a user's scalp model can be imported into the program and used for growing control strands.

2: (2) might allow for more control over hair placement, control, and volume [i.e. by changing the percentage of how many polys have control strands growing out of them], but a high-poly scalp could lead to increased computation time, since I would have to iterate through each poly face in the scalp and (based on a threshold), decide whether or not a control strand should grow out of that poly face. With the low-poly scalp, there are fewer poly faces to visit, and no need to check a threshold value, since every face gets a control strand. In addition, sparse control strands are probably more ideal for creating the "cluster" and "strip" LODs; what's the point of having a lot of control strands at my disposal when lower LODs eliminate the need for those extra control strands? A low-poly scalp also comes in handy for calculating hair-scalp collisions.

I think I'm going to lean toward (1) for now. In that case, I'd need to follow a pipeline similar to the following in order to get the starting scalp into an acceptable format:

(Click to enlarge)

This pipeline isn't too tedious, so perhaps it won't be that much of a drawback. If I have time later on during the course of the project, I could try to automate it (certainly there are algorithms out there for mesh decimation, right?).