ZBrush FiberMesh to Blender workflow testing

Time to start another project. I'm not sure what I'll be working on yet but I know it will have hair... Based on the feedback form for the new 3DSnippet project, it seemed like there is a lot of interest in hair, fur, and fibermesh-related questions so I thought we could try something different.

I've spent the past few days testing different things with the hair system in Blender and overall trying to understand some of the basics. Also, I wanted to try to get the FiberMesh guides to work in Blender so that I can take advantage of the Grooming brushes in ZBrush but the rendering capabilities in Blender.

Here's the result of the testing process using ZBrush and Blender:

So in this post, I'm going to cover all the stuff I found useful and I'll try to share with you a more structured approach to implement this workflow based on what I found worked for me. There is also a cool way to control density and other properties in the hair after the grooming process:

This is the quick FiberMesh test (ZBrush on the left) and the quick render without any modifiers (Blender on the right):

Now that I have a process that I feel more comfortable with, I'll start working on some ideas for the project so we can implement the workflow. Let's get started with the step-by-step...