Hi, I’m not an expert like Kent, but I could add something else to the answer.
Geometry modeling is not realistic and controlling your model in complex situations is much harder.
This way it’s easier to work, especially if you are creating AAA modeling because curves are easier to deform and at the end you will have just a few curves.
Making hair with particles in Blender is a mess and controlling the flow it’s very difficult, and creating difficult patterns like those showed on the links are a horror show.
Also, if you are sculpting and do not want to retopology your model or your model is very dense in poly counts, having your hair as an alpha gives you more control, because the particle systems is already baked in the alpha images, so your computer don’t slow down.
This technique works very well and to me was a game changer, just think it in this way, you could create organic stuff using box modeling or even hard surface modeling, but it won’t be give you a better result than sculpting… so that means that sculpting it’s easier than the other technique? Hell no! But it’s more powerful and has more tools and possibilities to create organic stuffs
Regards.
