hair

For this tutorial i was using lesson 27 and 28 of digital tutor's

Creating Stylized Males in Maya

 Using this tutorial i found a way to make hair in layers without using fur. This process can be highly helpful for creating realistic (or semi realistic) hair without having to use the notorious fur that murders your render time. The process is to make a nurbs plane and to shape it how you want to according to the style of hair that you want, then to take the texture node and attach a picture of hair to the color setting, and finally attach an alpha channel with edges on it to the transparency setting.
I'm really liking the results im having with the hair