Hi all! I have been working on strand rendering in cycles. It’s still quite early and experimental. The initial patch I worked on has now been included in trunk. So, any recent builds should contain this feature (later than 53373). A recent build can be downloaded from the link below.

http://builder.blender.org/download/

For full instructions on how to use it and what the settings do please visit the wiki http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Dev:Ref/Release_Notes/2.66/Cycles/Hair.

To use the hair rendering you must change the feature set' on the render tab to experimental’ (from `supported’) and be using the cpu to render. With these settings once a particle system is added new panels will be displayed in the particle tab to control the strands.

There are a few known limitations and bugs currently. These include: