Cycles Hair Shine

So here is the deal, I’m creating hair using polygons in cycles and I’m rather stumped on how to make good looking hair shine.


What I’ve tried so far is to create a specularity map and then use the specularity map as the ‘roughness’ for a toon shader. The results aren’t that great and I’m trying to find a better method. Using particle hair is not an option for this project, so I’m hoping someone out there has a good solution.

A little update on my progress. I’m using an Anisotropic shader and plugging my texture and spec maps into it. I then plug in my texture map into a diffuse shader and use a mix shader to combine the mix with the anisotropic. The result is pretty cool, but for some reason the hair is reflective. Any ideas?

There’s a Hair BSDF node that’s engineered for cycles. Is that familiar?

That’s for particle hair, isn’t it?

Yes. A diffuse/anisotropic mix is the shader you want for polygon hair. OP, what do you mean “the hair is reflective”? The shine is a reflection of light sources, so that’s not exactly wrong. If you’re seeing reflections of other object though, that probably means your roughness is too low. Also, try using a layer weight or fresnel to mix the two.

Thank you! The layer weight worked like a charm. The hair was so reflective that I could see the character’s face reflected in their hair, but the layer weight fixed it. I also subdued my spec map a bit which also helped.