With hair creation and simulation, it has always been difficult to achieve good results in a reasonable time frame. Getting hair to look believable is a hard task on its own. Having that hair animate believably can be even harder. The basic idea behind Hairtrix has been to make a combined generalized framework of tools that allow creation, manipulation, and rendering of sub-pixel objects such as hair. This is no easy task because of the complexity level of structures that have to be dealt with. However, Hairtrix makes creating and animating realistic hair and fur quickly and efficiently a reality.
Cure your creatures’ and characters’ baldness by applying the Hairtrix to any 3D geometry in your scene, and within seconds, you’ve got a lush sprouting of everything from short stubble to long silky hair that can be further refined and styled. In any 3ds Max viewport, users can then interactively push, pull, comb and cut Hairtrix hair to match their characters’ needs. Need your character to look like they just got out of bed? Then layer some frizz and randomness to the hairstyle in seconds. Want wet, matted hair for your creature? No problem, just apply spacewarps like gravity as well as complex specular hair shaders to achieve the look you’re after.

Just check out this extensive list of features that Hairtrix offers:

• Brush-based hair combing directly within the 3ds Max viewports
• Multiple dynamics engines (including Aegia PhysX) allow for complex motion to be created quickly for hair
• Cloth Mesh converter provides support for built-in cloth and SimCloth3 dynamics
• Advanced anti-aliasing engines for clean renders
• Full mental ray support
• Improved Surface Distribution dialogs allow new ways to derive parameters from the emitter surfaces
• Random Distribution curve controls allow the user to define the exact distribution of a parameter over its range
• Better and more flexible export of hair to external plug-in tools and MAXScript.
• Improved anti-aliasing through a new thick strand renderer
• Rendering in buckets of any size and order to lower memory usage and allow for better integration with ray tracers like finalRender and VRay
• Unique channel-based system allows for total control over visual properties of hair and fur including Vertex Color manipulation for real-time changes
• Multiple hair specific materials allow for a full control over the final look of your hair
• Atmospheric render controls allow users to balance render speed with quality output of their hair and fur creations
• Multiple hair modifiers allow layering of effects such as Frizz, Curliness, Direction, Clustering, Strand Detail and much more