This technical paper will guide you through how to create eyebrows for your model, you can

use this method to create other types of short hair but Im just going to talk about the eyebrows used for my characters. This paper will cover (in order):

Creating the eyebrows using the Paint Effects tool to paint onto the model Tweaking the paint effects setting to adapt the eyebrow to the model Converting the paint effects to polygon geometry in order to be rendered in mental ray. Adding shaders and textures to the eyebrows

First, we need to make Laurents head paintable. To do this you need to select the head mesh, then go to the Rendering tab which is in the top left corner, followed by clicking Paint Effects> Make Paintable.

I am using the brush circled above called the Grass Clump Brush, its a good brush to start off with as it is the closest preset to a normal eyebrow.

Select the brush and scale it to the approximate size you would like the eyebrow to be, I only scaled this slightly as you can make finer adjustments later on. To scale, hold the B key and drag left or right on the mouse while hold the left mouse button

Big

Small

My Custom Size

Now, click and carefully draw the eyebrow. You must do it all in one swoop in order for it all to be one object. Maya will then take a second to generate the geometry. It is important do draw the eyebrow from the inside outwards. The reason for this is so the hairs will be falling outwards like they naturally do. Now the eyebrow is done, switch back to the select tool and open up the Attributes Editor.

You should now be in the strokeShapeGrassClump1 tab. If you haven't drawn your eyebrow as straight as you would like it, or you want it to look a little smoother, you can amend that using the smoothing option. I put mine all the way up to 10 smoothness

You do not really need to touch any of the other settings in this tab, so now move onto the grassClump tab.

In the grassClump tab you should see a whole load of editing options, all to do with changing the shape, size, density, volume, texture, and style of the hair. We are only using the Brush Profile and Tubes options for this task. In the Brush Profile Tab the only thing I changed was the Brush Width, the other options do not really do much for this type of hair. The Creation Tab within the Tubes tab is where everything you will need is at. Tubes Per Step changes the density of the eyebrow, while Tube Rand just randomizes where the hairs are placed. Segments are the next thing you want to change, Segments Defines the maximum number of segments a hair can have. Because this is only an eyebrow you wont need many segments at all, so you will not need more then 4-5 segments. Length and width should be put to something quite low. Unless you want really large bushy brows, put the minimum length all the way down to 0.01 and the max length to about 0.1, this is a decent sizes eyebrow.

Tube Width 1 and 2 is the width of each hair. The width of a real human hair is 0.1 millimeters, so taking this into account these tube width values should also be very low. Tube Width 1 is the base of the hair while 2 is the tip, so I suggest making the tip smaller then the base.
To change the direction the hairs point in, fiddle around with the Elevation Min & Max. The hair will only raise and fall in the direction you drew it in, this is why its important to draw from inside outwards!

Now that all the editing is done we need to convert the eyebrow from a paint effect to polygons.

Make sure the poly limit is set to 100000, this is just to make sure it converts correctly Thats it! The eyebrow modeling is now complete. One thing to keep in mind that its best to NOT delete the history if your planning to animate your character. Only delete if you just plan to keep it as a model.

As you can see the eyebrow still looks like grass, so now its time to give it a better colour. You can do this with either textures or simple shaders, I just used a Lambert with a transparency ramp on the tips of the hairs.