What's the best way to create a set of catlike whiskers?

Shadowdream

I have a kind of odd D&D character I'm rendering for one of my party members. She's an elf who spent a while in the feywild and ended up with catlike whiskers.

I tried using the whiskers from the Renya model, but they didn't look quite right to me, too thick, didn't curve the way I wanted them to, that sort of thing. So I thought I'd play around with the strand based hair editor and make my own. Admittedly, I've done very little with it, just some playing around on a few occasions to try to learn that never did come out amazingly. I've styled some furs for one of the cats I have with it and that worked well, but other than that, I haven't done a ton with it.

Is there a way to place single hairs precisely? It seems like it randomly places hairs wherever you mask, which makes sense, but for this, I really want single hairs that are in precise places (in part because I'd like to go in and add a little displacement around the follicles to make that area kind of look like it does around the root of a cat whisker). Playing around with seed and density settings gets me lopsided whiskers and sometimes two or three hairs out of one dot on the mask, one hair out of another dot, and no hairs out of other dots.

If I can't place them precisely with the strand based hair tool, what would be the best way to create them? I have some Blender knowledge, but I've never tried to make hairs in Blender. I could hand paint them in post, but I'm not sure my painting skills would do them justice.

Thoughts and suggestions?

Thanks!!

Gordig

Reyna's whiskers are dForce fur, so you can make them thinner by lowering Line Start Width in the surface settings, and simulate them to change how they sit. If that still doesn't suffice for you, I'm not a Blenderer, but C4D and Houdini both have the ability to plant single hairs, as well as symmetrize.

Shadowdream

The line start width helped a LOT, thank you! I knew there had to be a setting in there, but I hadn't found it yet. :) 
I don't have access to C4D or Houdini, unfortunately. I'm pretty much on free or low-cost software except for some Adobe apps I still have access to from when I was a student (substance painter, photoshop, and the like).
Thank you!

Gordig said:

Reyna's whiskers are dForce fur, so you can make them thinner by lowering Line Start Width in the surface settings, and simulate them to change how they sit. If that still doesn't suffice for you, I'm not a Blenderer, but C4D and Houdini both have the ability to plant single hairs, as well as symmetrize.

Gordig

I wasn't suggesting that you use C4D or Houdini, just that those programs have such an ability, so I have to imagine Blender does as well.

Shadowdream

Understood!