Rendering Options

Here are the two papers/videos that I've been reading over to get a sense of the different hair rendering techniques out there (click on the pictures to watch the presentation videos).

Zinke's "Dual Scattering Approximation for Fast Multiple Scattering in Hair"

Scheuermann's "Practical Real-Time Hair Rendering and Shading"

Granted, I don't need to implement each method in full. For example, I could implement a single scattering (specular) + diffuse method, which is discussed in both papers (even though the first one uses it as a basis for comparison). As far as whether or not I'm going to render by strand or by strip, I'm not sure. I was originally planning on rendering each Bullet soft body hair as a LOD strip in OpenGL. One thing that I didn't consider before, however, is the interaction between key hairs in Bullet. Are collisions between the soft bodies being registered? It's difficult to tell. I don't think they are. It's important that I figure out how to turn on collisions between them, because intersecting strips are more obvious than intersecting strands (and even if I didn't have polygonal strips, lack of hair-hair collisions would cause the hairs to lie flat on the head...do not want!).