Just wondering...

Most (if not all) of the tutorials I've seen for creating trans-mapped hair seem to start from creating a texture in Photoshop/PSP/whatever to define the strands, then adding highlights and transparency later.

If any of these merchants/freebie providers (Koz is a freebie provider, and for that alone I admire him, not to mention the quality of his work, which is excellent)  still have the intermediate (strands only) stage available, then they could be VERY useful (assuming they were grey-scale)

1: Almost any colour could be applied to them.
2: The grey-scale could be utilised as a slight bump/displacement map to give the hair some depth (to alleviate the "helmet" effect).
3: Then specular should start to show some effect (showing up where relevant...).

4. In P5/6, the shader nodes could use this map in a lot of ways...

My "Just Wondering" does of course rely on the possibility that the various providers still have these intermediate bitmaps and whether they would be willing to share them...

If they're not available, maybe there's a niche market there? From someone who knows WTF they're doing (as opposed to myself)...

Cheers,
Diolma