Pixelated hair textures

After reading everything I could find on creating hair textures, I made a good dozen in Photoshop CS, trying out a variety of techniques: the taunt noise/blur method, sketching individual lines with copy/paste/smudge, and so on.

The picture below is a 512x512 texture, created using a solid fill, then individual lines on layers altered by color variations and lengthened with motion blur. Hehe, yes, after all that, still looks awful aesthetically. My question is: How do I avoid the pixelation seen in the cylinder? The farther away from the prim, the more obvious the pixelation.

Any ideas are appreciated. I need to figure this out; perhaps the technique I'm using should be abandoned.

Cheers.

Shao

PS The jpg's don't show the problem in all its glorious severity, alas...

well first to me its a waaay too big texture for hairs and for such a simple pattern, and your strands are prolly too thin (or repeat too much) hence what you call "pixelating"

The effect you see is unavoidable, but the finer the strands and the higher the contrast the more you're going to see this.

512x512 is very large for a hair texture.

Thanks, I'll switch to 256 and experiment with thicker lines.

Cheers,
Shao