This one has a long way to go before it makes something useful, but it has seen a bit of progress. Unlike the other recent attempt at fur, this one's goal was just to get simple shapes for detail fur tufts. These are the kind of fur details that, in a drawing, will often be no more than outline with the body color, rather than anything distinctive. The kind that can be drawn with simple squiggles. These kinds of details can be a bit harder to do in 3D, but I found an interesting feature that Maya's fur system (not XGen) supports: render as volume. Coupled with Mental Ray (although I think it can do it with software shader, too), specific volume shaders, and some settings tweaks, it renders fur a volume rather than rendering individual strands.

If I can get the parameters right, I think this has the potential to look really good! Volume can do some other neat things too, but the best part is how much faster it is than rendering hair primitives. It's primary draw back is that all that speed increase is lost in Mental ray because the volume shaders for that depend on photon mapping (otherwise it appears as completely flat and white like an cut-out) which requires additional rendering technologies that make take vastly longer than it would without them. However, I was planning on incorporating those technology anyways, so it's not too big of a deal.

There are still a lot of hurdles to overcome. Chief among them is the shader itself. It is still way over bright. I can't seem to fix that. The point were the fur volume meets the face suffers a bit with a low number of hairs, but that should improve once that portion of the face is properly shaded with white. Lighting, shadows, and especially self-shadowing are very challenging to do with fur, moreso to do right. The fur effect here still feels like its kind of floating above the face and not really attached or anything. There's something lacking that gives it that feeling of connection.

Most of all, however, I still suck at getting the shape of the fur to look nice :P