Particles to follow my mesh hair style?

Question

I have a hair issue, I want the particles to follow the mesh hair model, is there a way to do that? The hair mesh is made in 4 parts: forehead, sides and back part. For example is it possible to select my forehead hair part and then tell to particles to transform it into particle system?

Cuz when rendered with diffuse, normal map and gloss it looks not so good, at the tip of the hair you can see how it forms as polygon, instead of looking natural hair.

I want to make the tip of the hair to look natural like on this photo of Mavis:

and I think particles is the only way to do that, so if I manage to make it follow the form of the hair model, then I delete the hair mesh and use only the particles.

Back views:

Your help is much appreciated!!!!

Answer 1

Tangent emission

1) Without Particles System

Depending on your project's need, an alternative approach would be to use an alpha mask to mask the tip of the polygons and not showing the borders. It's a common strategy to avoid particles.

2) With Particles System

If you want to use particles, you could instead take advantage of the Tangent Velocity emission properties. By default hairs are pointing toward the emission face's normal. Giving everything the punk & spikey look. To see the Velocity tab you'll have to enable Advanced options in the Particles system tab.

Once unwrapped your objec and controlled the flowing of the UV island like in the image below:

you just have to set the Normal velocity to 0 and transfer it previous value to the Tangent parameter (see the cursor), so hair particles will follow the direction given by the UV map.

Obiuvsly, this is just a starting point. If you would like to gentle set up the hair in a natural position, you'll have to comb them with the proper tools or run a physic simulation of the scene (you'll have to enable Hair Dynamics in the particle system and Collision for the "head" the object) like shown in the floowing image sequence: