Dimension dESIGN Animation Group (part of Chaotic Dimension) have released version 1.01.15 of the SHAG:Hair plugin for 3ds max ( R3 | R4 )

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New features:
· A new option Translucency in the Hair Shader. Until now, the model used by the hair shader treated the hair strand as completely translucent. This caused too high levels of diffuse illumination (especially when there were more lights in the scene), and required almost each light to cast hair shadows, which is expensive. Now the Hair Shader can take into account strand self-shadowing when light falls behind it. By turning strand translucency down to 0, you can significantly lower the diffuse shading component of the hair. For backward compatibility with older scenes, the default value is set to 1.0.
Note: translucency has effect only when illuminating hair objects.
· Since many users find the Hair Shader useful for other things, not just hair, its behavior for non-hair objects was improved. Until now, the Hair Shader didn’t check the surface normal of the object to see if light reaches the point or not. This caused illumination on the back-side of objects, which is wrong. Also, the Soften parameter of the standard shaders was added to the Hair Shader, it works for non-hair geometry only. With these additions, the Hair Shader can now be used with non-hair objects as another anisotropic shader.
· A new plugin object called WaveWind. This is the standard Wind warp, with the additional option to control the strength with a 3D texture map. Very useful for animating grass blown by the wind.
· A separate Quality spinner in the Hair Shadows, which lets you set a much lower quality for shadows and speed up rendering considerably, without sacrificing image quality. For example, if your use image quality of 5, you can easily set the hair shadows quality to 3.
· An option in the Hair Shadows to do faster filtering, at the cost of a little lower quality. Usually the visual difference is small enough to justify the speed increase.

Fixes:
· Rendering speed optimization.
· Fixed a strange crash bug when rendering on dual-CPU machines (it was actually avoided, not fixed - I didn't understand the cause for it). This required a small increase in the memory amounts used at render time.
· The coverage image channel generated by the Shag G-buffer Output effect caused Combustion to crash. The fact is that Shag cannot generate a complete and correct coverage channel, because it cannot write to G-buffer channel layers other than the topmost. This was fixed by writing only “full” and “no” coverage values to the channel. This will probably make it useless for some post-effects.
· The modeling cutters did not work when Fix Shape was enabled.
· Fixed unneeded hair geometry generation when saving MAX scenes or opening the object properties dialog. It used to cause serious slowdowns or even crashes on machines with less RAM.
· The "Copy from internal render buffers" option in the Shag G-buffer render effect can now output the Velocity channel as well, when pre-calculated dynamics is present.
· Restricting cutters are faster in the viewports
· ShagView's didn't show up in light include/exclude lists when the corresponding Shag atmospheric entry was disabled.
· Added an error message when memory allocation fails during render.