This is the finest and fastest
photo-realistic hair renderer money can
buy, and has more in common with ILMÆs
OscarÖ-winning hair renderer than it has
with its competitors. This is not so
surprising when you consider that Shave
And A HaircutÆs author wrote ILMÆs first
hair renderer 6 years ago. This
altogether new fractal hair rendering
algorithm requires less than 32MB of RAM
to render millions of hairs, and is
several orders of magnitude faster than
previous approaches.

But wait, thereÆs more! Shave And A
Haircut comes with hair modeling tools
that have no equal. In addition to
automatic grooming, guide hairs are
incredibly fast bi-directional IK chains.
You can control them one at a time, or
grab thousands and just comb away. There
is collision detection built into the
sculpting process as well, so hair goes
around the skull, not through it.

Features include:
Self-shadowing
Cast shadows
Soft shadows
Motion blur
Transparency
Breakthrough fractal algorithm
Interactive IK modeling
Collision detection
Dynamics
Gravity
Wind
Deforms perfectly with skin
Very light on RAM usage
Seamless integration
Multiple characters
No waiting!!! (OK, maybe a little).

http://www.joealter.com