SO Character - Hair

The hair was one of the most challenging parts of the project and the one that slowed me down the most. I had to go through a lot of trial and error before finding a good way to do it for this character.
Initially, I sculpted the hair in Zbrush and was planning to use that and maybe add some hair planes, but after thinking for a bit I decided to make the hair entirely of hair planes because it is something I've never done before and wanted to learn it. I spent a few days researching and looking at different tutorials on ways to do it, some were using fiber mesh in Zbrush, others xGen in Maya or 3ds Max. The simplest way of creating the hair texture that I found was using the Hair Strand Designer from Artstation Marketplace, it gives pretty good results quickly and generates all the necessary maps, and it's also very easy to learn. In the beginning I created my hair textures using this program and started placing them around. After about one day of work in which I covered the entire head, I realised that this is not the best way of making this particular hairstyle and it would probably take me a lot of time to get some decent results and I didn't think I could be able to finish it until the deadline.
So I gave up on this idea and starting looking into other ways of doing it. The character's hairstyle is quite stylised and I couldn't find any life references for it, so I used references from Final Fantasy games, which have similar hairstyles that also look quite realistic (for example, Final Fantasy XV). Most of the references that I used were from Final Fantasy XIII and XIV, I tried looking at how they do the hair and how their textures look and I could find the 3D model for on the characters from XIII which was quite interesting to see. What also helped me a lot, was using the online dressing room for Final Fantasy XIV where you could see the 3D models and change their hair styles, so I used that to see how they places the haird planes and how they painted the textures.
After all this, I decided to hand paint my textures and created 4 really dense hair strands which I used to cover the entire head so the character wouldn't have any bald spots. The way I placed the hair cards was by using splines in 3dsMax, I made the planes for the hair with a little curve on the Y axis, which was more accentuated at the bottom than the top. Placing them took a lot of time in general and because I had to keep exporting them to Marmoset to see how they would look, as 3dsMax wasn't displaying the alpha maps properly and I couldn't always see what I was doing.
I ended up painting 4 more hair strands which were a little less dense to add more variety to the hair, and then one more strand which was really thin for fly away hairs, so in total, I had 9 different layers of hair, some of which had only 15-20 planes and others which had 70-80 planes.
At the end, I created a normal and roughness map in Photoshop for it and also painted some eyelashes.

In total, the hair has around 5k tris. It took almost an entire week to get it done, but some of the days were wasted (except for exercise) on different attempts until I figured out how to do it. Overall, I am glad I managed to get it done even though I am not entirely happy with how it turned out and the fact that it doesn't match the hairstyle from the concept too well. At this point I'm feeling it's too messy and I would like to be able to make the hair clumps look more organised, but I still need to study and practice more until I'll be able to get a nicer result for this hairstyle.