I am trying to make long hair for my current WIP but I can't for the life of me get anything to work the way I would like [img]/images/graemlins/frown.gif[/img]

I had an idea though...

Can I use the hair tool in max to make my desired hair look then convert it to an editable poly. Then model a base mesh in roughly the right shape and bake it into a normal and transparency map?

Converting hair into editable poly is going to be costly on performance, it will be next to impossible to convert it from edit poly to anything useful. Each hair will be a cylinder/spline The only thing I can see working would be to use some other program that allows you to build low poly geometry off extremely high ploy meshes, even then it might interpet it wrong.

I played around with the idea of converting each hair to a metaball and then merging them all using the particle system but max would crash even on very low hair settings.

If you're aim is to make some simple opacity planes then that is easy to set up the hair system to do.

Sweet, thanks Vig [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]

although you could still render the hair, and use the render as a texture for the plains

I used Maya Paint Effects for hair for my Sam character and it only translated to about 60k tris, which was quite manageable and easy to convert, so I'm not sure if Max has anything similar to PFX that you could play with. But I think I've seen that done with Max too. You might want to look at this. I would have sworn there was a tutorial too, but if not, I think the process is explained.