If you’re unhappy with the built-in hair capabilities of Autodesk’s 3ds Max, then you might want to check out “Hair Farm” from CyberRadiance.

Hair Farm is not just another tool for producing hair on virtual characters. It is a completely new design that combines state-of-the-art technologies with an artist-friendly user interface and a flexible workflow.

Some of the novel technologies in Hair Farm are the following:

  • A whole new hair modeling pipeline combining the best ideas both the industry and the academia, including hair mesh modeling,
  • An artist-friendly realistic hair material that can efficiently handle complicated light behavior like multiple scattering in hair volume to produce physically-based realism,
  • A highly optimized high-quality ray tracer for hair that automatically handles anti-aliasing without the need to specify the number of samples,
  • A whole new hair simulation technique that can robustly handle complicated models and advanced physical behavior like hair-hair interaction,
  • Technologies in curve representations for modeling and rendering.

The results are impressive, as evidenced by their gallery. Available now for prices ranging from $70 (rendernode) to $1000 (professional).

Hair Farm™ – The Ultimate Hair Plug-in for 3ds Max.