Trying to perfect fur

I have been experimenting with fur, I have chosen to use fur instead of individual feathers with fur applied as this looks to be a better match to a magpie. As predicted my UV's have had to be perfect in order to avoid patchy fur although i have spent a few hours with the following problem assuming it was down to my UV's when it wasn't.

The patchy fur on the above picture is not caused by the UV layout but instead caused by the "Roll" variable. Roll and Inclination allow the individual hairs to be uniformly rotated. Roll on the above fur was set to 1 and as a result the hairs around the neck had aligned themselves slightly inside the mesh.

After a bit of trial and error the fur above has been fixed.

I have used fur once before and encountered the same problem then as i do now; how to successfully eliminate fur from certain parts. In this case the legs and a partial part of the beak needed to be bald. Maya includes a feature where baldness can be "painted" on the various surfaces. The few times i have tried to paint baldness this way it has lead to frustration trying to remove specific hairs that will not paint out.

The second option is to create a map for the fur, the map is a gradient from white to black that allows you to gradient the length of the fur depending on the gradient. I have never used this method but it is likely I will experiment at some point as it seems to be the standard way of applying fur.

The method i have used is also common but maybe not quite as diverse; to replicate the part of the mesh i need fur on. Then apply the fur to the mesh, then hide the mesh. The result is the picture above, my main concern with this method is potential problem when applying a rig and animating. It's for this reason i'll look into creating a fur map.

As can be seen the seam of the UV on the wings needs to be applied more successfully. Obviously the colour is wrong but this experiment was only to see if a uniform fur could be applied over the bird. The next stage is to add a texture to the UV map in Photoshop and then plug this into the channel of the base and tip opacity on the fur, once this is done in theory the colour of the UV map should flow through the fur and it will have the colouring of a magpie.

Below are some experiments i wasn't happy with for various reasons.