Coming to you in Beta 2…
Get out! that’s craziness 
The images might be a bit misleading.
We are not adding a “Render Hair” button to Krakatoa.
It just happens to be a side effect of a much more general feature we added 
Or as Chad put it in another thread, “You can render ANYTHING as points…”
(I know I am pulling a Ken Pimentel on you, but it is very enjoyable)
Speculator ENGAGE!
So it looks to me like non-zero sized points, which is cool, but also per-point sizing (in this case defined by age or distance), which is cool, but said more slowly and with more contemplation.
Perhaps with the “define a sphere centered at the point location with the diameter of the particle size and fill sphere with the number of points that is the sample rate multiplied by the volume of sphere, with the density divided by the number of points. Oh, and maybe define the density to also be divided by something like the ratio between the distance from the center and the radius of the sphere raised to a power, so you can make puffs, not balls.”
Am I close?
- Chad
haha, I figured as much 
for a moment though 
The idea behind it is awesome though, with my very limited Hair 'n Fur experience is that it takes forever to render (especially with shadows), you could almost paint the barn and watch it dry.
Ram and patience 
Can’t wait to see what you have in store.
LOL, he’s getting real good at teasing, you aren’t doing so bad yourself you know
Chad, even if you didn’t nail it on the head it sure sounds good to me
Not even near!
Speculator REFINE!
Ok, so it’s not points at all, but voxels…
And you’re changing how the sampling is done, so that voxel size is uncoupled from the search radius. This lets you grab the infinitely thin hairs and “bulk” them up by allowing distant voxels to accumulate color and density from them.
Am I close?
- Chad
My wild conclusions (2 so far) are based on the fact that you aren’t changing the “hairstyle”, only the thickness and softness, so it’s nothing to do with “hair” at all. If the 4 renders are all showing something more subtle that that, then I don’t see it.
- Chad
What we did was something much less exotic.
Here is a Krakatoa rendering of Max Hair&Fur with some dynamics.
We did not do anything to the renderer itself.
We just exposed PRT generation to MAXScript, so I wrote a short MAXScript to export PRT files with the hair data (or anything I please).
Hair was just the closest thing to mind when I wanted to try out the new system. First I wrote my own, today I got Hair&Fur modifier support.
You can do the same from Fusion already, so for you it might not be a big deal, but now I can write PRT files with arbitrary content using a simple particleOstream and dump any channels I want just like writing a regular file.
The hair thickness is due to the linear density falloff. Most of the examples were voxel rendering since it lets me change the volume, but for thin hairs particles work great and are much faster, too.
Sorry for the tease