It also came as a problem that the hair doesn't look the same when rendered at different resolutions, it was very difficult to spot mistakes and decide for the correct density at low resolution renders. In order to be able to test the hair correctly, I have created a test scene with a single light, without any shadows or GI and just a simple diffuse material for the skin mesh. Most of my hair render tests were made in this scene at about 3000 pixels and with render times around 2 minutes.
After having reached the conclusion that I needed a hair count of about 2700 000 hairs (!) another problem came up... I just couldn't render anything larger than the 1500x3000 pixels resolution. I have used the “hair buffer” method for hair rendering (“mrprim” and “geometry” couldn't handle this amount of hair) and at the time of rendering only two thirds of the hair showed up. Later, I have discovered that there is a 70 MB buffer to write the hair to, and at higher resolutions this buffer value is not sufficient. In order to fix this go to “Effects>Hair and Fur” and inside the “Buffer Rendering Options” increase the “Tile Memory Usage” and that will solve the problem. The bigger the resolution, the bigger the buffer. Sounds simple when you know what to do...
In below image you can see the 3 different base meshes I have used to grow hair on the body, snout and tail as well as the hair count for each. The hair guides are represented in yellow.
In this image I have compiled all the numbers used to generate the final hair. For the “Tip Color” and “Root Color” I have used textures with a brownish tone, brighter for the tip and slightly darker for the root. Don't forget that the color swatches for the Tip and Root multiply by the texture color, so change the swatches to white, otherwise it will affect the texture color.
Below shows the hair resulting from the guides and settings previously described.
The Skin
The renderer I have chosen for this project was V-Ray, a long time companion.
The 1.5 SP3 version of V-Ray presents a new excellent shader, the Vray Fast SSS2. It was created to make subsurface scattering materials fast and easy. I have used this shader for the first time in this project and it is very similar to MentalRay's SSSFastSkin Material. I confirm that it is blazzing fast!
Subsurface scattering was crucial in this piece because I had set up a strong light from the back and it allowed me not only to emphasize the rabbit's silhouette but also to represent the characteristic translucent effect in the ears. You can check the used textures and shader settings in below image as well as the render result of the applied skin material. You will notice, by examining the fingers on the right hand, that the subsurface scatter radius is a little bit exagerated, however the important part were the ears as the rest would be covered by hair.
 
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