With the basemesh of the dragon available to me, I started to work on what I was imagining the hair for our dragon to look like. With general less simulation going on with him and a completely different of style all together, I decided to go with a different workflow than the one presented in the default Houdini workflow.
To start off, I wanted to consider the style of the dragon's hair, and how that is different than Saint George's. Overall, it is going to be much shorter and less condensed. Also, it will be a lot more frizzy and wirey than Saint George.
With that in mind, I set out to work on the dragons hair. The first attempt I went with the same kind of network that I had experimented with on Saint George, using the default Houdini hair workflow. The results I came to were alright, but not what I wanted. I was getting hair, but not the length I wanted in certain places and not with the control I hoped for. Also, the blending between areas with hair and not hair was... not good. There was just too jarring of a line between textured areas and not, it didn't work well with the character at all.
Trying to branch outwards, I attempted a different kind of network, basically building one up from scratch instead of letting houdini do the work for me. It started to create results much closer to what I was looking for. This custom network was created by setting a series of guides where I wanted them on the surface of the geometry. From there, I created a group of velocity nodes that would let me draw directly on the surface of the geometry, feeding that directional information into the guide node to basically sculpt it for me. This helped a lot with the blending of the hair, letting there be inbetweens for the different directions that the fur was to travel.
With this in mind, I pushed further into the node network, adding more nodes to further personalize and stylize the hair. With the wiry look I had in mind, I added frizz to the fur as well as clumping, trying to get it to bunch together in a more animalistic way than a well combed human's. Once I achieved something closer to the look I was going for I went into a length node, trimming away at the hair.
With the length node, I painted away areas that I didn't want any fur to come out of. I also used the opportunity to 'trim' the fur, making a gradient of no-hair to hairy places on the geometry.
There is still a lot of touchup to do on how I want this fur to look, but it is a great start. The hair is looking primitive and wiry, and it is beginning to match up with our concept art of the dragon. A few patches on his body still need fur added to it, and everything needs to be further groomed. But as a start, it is getting to where I want it to be.