I've been working on this for the past week or however much's been (lost track heh), thought I should provide an update/where I'm at with it.
finished and laid the first 2 layers of hair, so the volume, coverage and flow is pretty much there. Hard part with this is done and it's a matter of detailing now. It could be used as is though, with minor tweaks, this is a lot more "finished" than my previous styles would be at this stage, all the main details are there and the hairline is pretty closed off. I will definitely be spending more time on it and detailing this further though, because the quality level is not good enough for me in this state.
the hair is on the looser side, so having that side ponytail doesn't make a lot of sense, gravity would just pull it down the center, but going too tight is a pain in the ass with the blocky FO4 scalp, so I'd rather have it like this. Yep, as always when making one of these, I'll express my dissatisfaction with that FO4 headmesh, it's awful to work with.
I'm reusing the jhair11 textures for this hair model, I wanted to see how it would turn out when I'm not using purpose built textures for a specific style. The hairstyle were similar and had the same type of textures need for the most part. I did run some tests beforehand and determined it was fine and it's mostly been going ok so far. It's not ideal, had some minor trouble with the bangs up front, but that's about it. It also saved A LOT of time, at least 2-3 days of making textures from scratch and setting up everything for use when modelling. I'll also be reusing the model for the hair elastic from that model too, since it's already made, currently I have just a placeholder cylinder for that, since it's easier to deal with.
last main thing that's missing, other than remaining detail on this, are those 2 hair clips on the left side. I did model them but I have not placed them yet. It will be a challenge placing those and having all the cards interact with them convincingly, so I wanted to wait until I had the main volume in place and reached the finer/thinner cards, but yeah, I haven't forgotten about those if you were wondering, those will definitely be in and should be next on the to do list.