Could this work for Hair/Fur for UE4 meshes?

Before a small hiatus I took last month, there’s been much discussion on these forums about hair/fur with importing models to UE4, but little timetable on a solution.

I realise this was built for 3ds Max, but since it is not a plugin and instead a MAXscript, I was wondering if someone at Epic could take a look at it and see if it’s a suitable workaround for people using that animation package:

http://www.aarondabelow.com/v1/pages/maxscript/maxscript-animated_hair_fur_map.html

That script uses Max-specific features to drive the Max-specific offline renderer to allow animated textures for the Max-specific hair/fur modifier.
None of that has an equivalency in Unreal Engine, so I don’t think it would help at all.

What you can do is use the NVIDIA APEX tools for 3ds Max to build “cloth” that is actually your “hair,” and then apply that APEX file to your hair mesh after you import a skinned character.
This can work okay for certain kinds of hair styles. Not so great for fur, though.

Separately, if you want to animate textures used for hair, you can do that in the material/node system inside Unreal Engine. There’s no easy way I know of to author such animations inside 3ds Max and export them over, though.

That script has nothing to do with actually adding hair, it just allows you to use animated maps with the hair system.