Hair styling in 3D

Trying to get at least the head finished for one of the poster critiques, I started thinking about making the hair. For a ease of mind I did a quick one on Zbrush to avoid looking at a bold head all the time. It was quick and frankly... awful, but at least I had an idea of what I was going for.
I decided to go for a more final fantasy look by making planes with textures and transparency rather than going for geometrical hair. This last one was used in games like kingdom hearts for the main character (Sora ) on game play, but not for the cinematic

Technically speaking I wanted to get an end result like this:

At this point in time the texture still a work in progress as I want to give it requires a lot of attention and I'm currently battling between engines (Unity and UDK).
So far I've created a few simple brushes in photoshop that will help me get hair lock-like strokes

Something that I never really considered much is the fact that my character's got two colours of hair (of course) the top part is blond and the bottom one is dark brown. This reduced my texture space quite significantly but hopefully I'll be able to achieve good quality of with specualr maps.