You could really lot less polygons and longer overlapping polygons and you would have same result at final, special for some action game where spiders are in movement.
Be a shame to drop that much money on a hair solution only to find out it wasn’t for realtime stuff 
Galeon, Do you have a example?
Great thread! I’m learning so much from you all. Just this weekend, I was creating a character using Autodesk Character Generator. I have this wonderful looking character but the hair options didn’t look so great. So I imported a bald model into Maya LT hoping to created my own hair but finding the task much more complicated than I originally thought.
Didn’t want the Ken doll hair look so I been watching and reading methods for creating realistic looking hair good games. I would like up get that Final Fantasy XIII-2 hair look and movement. Unfortunately Maya LT doesn’t come with hair options nor support plugins. So it looks like I’ll have to manually create hair polygon. Overall, the task looks daunting but I’m up for. Thanks for the tips so far.
This is a little bit older, but the Varga hair tutorial by Paul Tosca is still useful when talking about creating polygon hair. The youtube video mentioned earlier is also a good reference, and a lot faster method.
As a side note, Yeti is definitely not for video game hair. Hair simulation is on the horizon, and I know at least one person here on the forums was working on it. Both AMD and Nvidia have solutions for real-time hair simulation, but at the moment they’re not available to we average folks yet.
Thanks guys 
How many tris are you getting with all those planes?
I thought even traditional hair wasn’t possible until they implement some kind of soft masking?
hello, It’s two years later and I have the same question about zbrush fibermesh. I have let an asset try to import for twelve hours now, its still going. Not sure if it will every make it. Anyways, i’m going to start a new thread as this one is unlikely to get a response, being dated.
Is there no way to take advantage of instanced geometry instead of having potentially thousands of identical planes in the same mesh ?
GPU instanciated meshes is not a silver bullet for everything.
Instanced Static Meshes won’t help here, the Triangles have to be drawn nonetheless.
If I was you, I’d try to “batch” close hair planes together, or even completely simplify it by using long planes along the Legs instead of multiple small planes.
The Amount of “Hair Detail” is absolutely not necessary, because you don’t use close-up shots of the spider at all.
The difference in my case is that I’d like to use cards with 6 faces, so I think instanced geometry will make a big difference. (I’m not making a spider and I need the fur cards to be animated in the wind so I can’t use long planes like you suggest)
If you want animated fur cards then you should combine them into a single mesh and smooth bind them to the character’s skeleton.
The wind animation you make by applying subtle physics to the skeleton bone that the hair cards are skinned to.
This technique sounds complicate for my model (a wolf) and means I’ll have to renounce on using 6 faced cards. I must say I’m a bit surprised that Unreal Engine which I think has more reasons to have the ability to use instanced hair cards than Blender does cannot do it while Blender can.