Fibermesh hair cards?

Selek

I've spent many hours trying different ways to create my own hair.  I have some nice results with Daz's strand-based hair, but the hair ends look a tad spiky to me, it's hard to make complex styles, and the hair has a very high poly count (over 1 million!).  I own ZBrush and have similar results with Fibermesh, but again the poly counts are high (more like 500,000).  I have an old system, just 12G of RAM and a GTX 980 (4G VRAM), so render time is a concern for me.  I'm actually pleasantly surprised that I can render respectable closeups of both SBH and Fibermesh, 1920 x 1080, in about an hour.  Still, hair cards render a lot faster for me.  Plus, I figured I might be able to try to make dForce hair cards; can't do that with SBH.

I've never made hair cards, but I found a tutorial that seemed to promise quick cards using Fibermesh and a very high coverage setting -- effectively creating very wide Fibermesh strips.  https://magazine.renderosity.com/article/6145/zbrush-hair-card-basics ; Alas, the tutorial glosses over how to texture the things.  You can start with as few as 3000 Fibermesh 'cards" this way.  The strips look something like the pictures I've seen of hair cards.  But texturing them hasn't worked well for me.  I've tried using some alpha hair card textures (opacity maps) I found for free on DeviantArt, but I've actually had better luck with the diffuse maps that ship with the Toulouse Hair.  Neither looks great, though. Also, the diffuse maps render on both sides of the "cards" in ZBrush but not in Daz.

Any advice on all this?  If I want to try hair cards, am I better off just modeling hair in ZBrush the traditional way?  Regardless of whether I use Fibermesh or modeling to make hair mesh, can anyone advise on how to make or find opacity and diffuse maps for it?  Finally, would I just be better off sucking it up and trying to find ways to make somewhat less-huge SBH or Fibermesh?

Many thanks in advance.