Hair and render tweaking

After a long day of heavy tweaking for this character I was finally able to get the hair to render out decently. I'll still need to tweak some of the strands, but all and all I think I'm getting to the look I was going for. I had to reduce the amount of hairs per clump by half in order to even get it to render all out. I also added the hair part of the texture to the top of the head to help with the effect.

I basically made 3 different render passes. One for the color, another for the AO pass and lastly was a hair alpha render pass so I could use it as a selection in photoshop. The AO was used as both an overlay at 50% along with a multiply at 50%. The reason I do this is because the first AO using the overlay will increase the contrast on the character so you can get some nice highlights and decent shadows. The second AO using the multiply helps push back the shadows even more. I then colorize the multiply pass to give it more of a skin tone feel.