More hair... MORE HAIR

Well, today was quite an okay day with a horrifying end.

I came in to college with some questions about the hair.
The first problem was the eyebrows. They didn't maintain their shape and kept hanging downwards (like gravity makes them do, I guess? Yay, gravity) After some tweaking here and there, some deep sighs and frustrating words muttered, the answer was simple: Change de influences to none. Maintain their shape, no flailing around, and behaving like the animated lattice orders them to. So that turned out a lot easier than expected.

Then working on the normal hair was the starting point of a lot of frustration. At the beginning it was too loose. Like it was underwater, it was floating all over the place, so at first I tried to put up a  bit of the starting point attraction: this seemed to help at least a bit. After some tweaking, I playblasted it to see if it looks alright. Ambitious Mat always wanted to push it a bit further, but there was no middle ground to be found. It was either too stiff, or too loose. But the main point of irritation was that the hair stays a lot in it's assigned clumps, instead of loose hair strands. A bit like a tassel of a tablecloth. After more frustration we came to the conclusion that it maybe has to do something with the fact that my model isn't entirely up to the correct scale (about perhaps two feet instead of 5'5"? Which would seem more probable.) Eventually we came to a point where we felt it couldn't be better and the way I (we) essentially would like it to, so I started to cache the hair system.

After caching the hair system I would be ready to go to render, so I wanted to start rendering a bit and see how far I would come. Boy, didn't that work out the way I wanted it to. I have a bad history with rendering, as in: it doesn't like me. It always crashes every few frames so I have to restart the batch render over and over and over again. Very frustrating. So I was hoping for something different this time round.
Not so much. Rendering 1 frame already took 1 minute (which was already bad enough), but then it stopped right there. It didn't want to continue rendering the other frames, but technically it hadn't stopped rendering as well. So I cancelled the batch render, saved the file and restarted Maya. That's where the horror began. I wanted to move the time slider back to the first frame, but then Maya stopped responding. So restart and try again. And again. And again, no result. Restart again, switch off the hair, back to first frame: succes! Turn on the hair to render; nope. It then came to a point of frustration that the file wouldn't open anymore. At all. (At this point I fell the whole world crumbling down beneath my seat.) Because I OF COURSE had replaced my old files I couldn't reach them anymore, and on no computer/laptop would the file let itself be opened. I freaked out, I cried, I sobbed and tried to look for a solution. For I thought the file would've been damaged, I tried to find my overwritten files, only to be let down every time that I wouldn't be able to recover it because I didn't have a license of the program. I tried calling my brother who knows some stuff, he connected me to his best friend (also known with Maya) but we still couldn't figure it out. Finally Mat replied! And he suggested moving the cache file for it may be a bit too heavy to open. It worked! Bless! I really thought I had damaged my file and lost two months of animating, but lucky me: that's not the case. (Maybe I should just finally configure the Time Machine, just in case I really lose files. again. (this totally didn't happen before) (Yes it did) )

So after 2.5 hours of stress and sobbing I got to the solution and I'm going to look freshly at it tomorrow.