The higher the value, the more reflective the hair strands. The typical value for human hair is 1.55. Values in the range 2-4 are typical for human hair. Positive values shift the highlight away from the root of the hair, while negative values move the highlight closer to the root. Highlight shift– Shifts the highlights along the hair strand. Higher values make the highlights wrap almost completely around the strands giving the hair a smoother look, while lower values make the it look crispier.

Softness – Controls the overall softness of the hair by how much the highlights are wrapped around the individual hair strands. This can be useful for reproducing the effect of shiny coating on rough looking fur. Primary glossiness – Additional scaling factor to boost the primary reflection glossiness. It primarily controls the width of the highlight, essentially how shiny the hair appears. Glossiness – Controls the glossiness along the hair strand. Although the diffuse parameter allows for some artistic control, for realistic results it is best to disable it by leaving the Diffuse amount at 0. Note that real-world hair or fur does not have a diffuse component. Use this for materials made out of cloth threads or other non-translucent fibers, as well as for dirty hair.ĭiffuse amount – Specifies the amount for the diffuse component of the material. White is fully opaque, while black is fully transparent.ĭiffuse color – Controls the diffuse component of the shader. For a dyed hair look, set the Melanin to 0, otherwise the melanin darkens the dye color and pheomelanin introduces redness to it.

See the Pheomelanin example below.ĭye color – Applies a color tint to the hair. The Pheomelanin value will have no effect if the Melanin is set to 0. The ratio of melanin to pheomelanin determines how red the hair is. Pheomelanin – The redness (pheomelanin content) of the hair strand as fraction of all melanin. See the Melanin examplebelow to understand how different values work. The higher the value assigned, the higher the concentration of melanin and the darker the hair strands are. Melanin – The pigmentation component that gives the hair strand its main color. See the Presets example below for comparison. You can choose between White, White (Fur), Sandy Blond, Golden Blond, Light Brown, Dark Brown, Aged Dark Brown, Ginger Red, Auburn, Scarlet Red(Dyed), Atlantic Blue (Dyed), Lagoon Blue (Dyed), Black presets. It depends on what you want to do.Preset – Offers some commonly used hair settings as presets. TLDR: They do similar things but not the same way. It really depends on what you want to get out of it and how you are looking to use it? If you're just doing render projects or baking it down, then I guess it doesn't matter. The only real problem I have with XGen is that it doesn't output guides for Nvidia hairworks. There are some plug-ins for Maya that do a slightly better job and have some nice approaches, but it really depends, if you need their specific features/improvements or not. With XGen I'm pretty happy to use it out of the box for quite a few hairstyles. 3dsmax Hair/Fur is not bad for somethings, but there have been a lot of plug-ins that offer a lot better functionality since then and if you're a max user you pretty much need a plug-in to do decent hair.

XGen is pretty good for an out of the box solution, it easily beats 3dsmax's ancient hair/fur modifier which is just a really old version of Shave and a Haircut, 3 or 5 I think. Since it seems like you would like a comparison, here are my thoughts as a 10+ yr 3dsmax user and a 5+ yr Maya user. You can't use it due to price or someone said no, or you didn't know that it existed for maya?

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