Hello,
This is another one of my cool tutorials lol, now I absolutely hated modeling hair, in fact i sucked at it for a long while, but i did manage to find a way to make really cool hair using splines and lofts, so let’s go ahead and get this tutorial underway.
For this tutorial i will be using the Female IMVU avatar as my subject. Go ahead and get 3dsmax loaded up with the same avatar which you can find here (Female Weighting File ) if you do not have it.
First thing we want to do is clone the avi’s scalp and texture it, this will prevent the appearance of gaps when making a hair mesh. So we need to click on the avatar’s head and expand editable poly, then click Polygon.
Now what we want to do is select enough polygons to make up the hairline, like so.
Next step is to clone the selection, you can do this easily by clicking the move tool and then holding shift and drag the selection in some direction, it will ask you whether to clone to Object or element, we want clone to object.
We should now have our own seperate scalp mesh to work with, go ahead and realign it back to the head, we then want to add the Push modifier to it.
Using the push modifier is great it allows us to scale our model up or down without losing any orientation to positions of its original shape. Let’s go ahead and type in a value of 1.0 on push, what this will do is prevent faces of our scalp from overlapping the head causing weird zbuffer renders bald patches everywhere.
Now that we have our scalp pushed out, let’s move on to making the actual hair using splines and lofts. So go ahead and navigate to the Create tab, then to the shapes sub-tab and then in the drop down box select NURBS curves.
We are going to want to use the Point Curve tool, so go ahead and select it. Now we want to draw a strand of hair extending from the top of the head down to some side. After you have drawn your curve you can then go to Edit tab click on point and edit the position of each points manually to get the curve the way you want.
This is what i ended up with.
Next we want to define the shape of the hair, so probably in the front view using the point curve tool we need to draw a little flat ovalish thing like so.
Right, now we need to create our first loft. Go back to the create tab, and then the geometry sub-tab, then in the drop down box select compound objects. Before you click anything make sure your original strand of hair is selected. Then click Loft.
Since the strand of hair IS our path we don’t need to click get path, but we do need to click get shape, so go ahead and click get shape and then select that oval thing we made earlier. you should then see something like this.
You should see a big mesh following the contour of your hairline, now we just need to adjust the way it looks a bit and how it fits on the head. If you navigate back to the edit tab you should have the loft selected, down below int he rollout menu you should see a label called “Deformations”. You’ll need to expand that, here there is tools to adjust the Size and angles of the loft from beginning to end. Let’s start by clicking on Scale. You should see a little window like so.
From here we can manipulate its size from point A to Point B, for starters let’s just go ahead and drag the far right black box there down to the 0 line. :O look what happened ooooh.
Now its starting to look like a chunk of hair. Using the tools above you can add more of those black boxes across the line to manipulate the rate it scales as it goes down the curve.
If you open Twist in the rollout menu under loft right below scale, it should pop up the same sort of window. This will allow you to change the way the hair turns as it travels down the curve.
Now the best part about lofts i believe you’ll engine is it typically automatically maps the hair for you, for instance if i take this hair texture.
And then apply it to the hair mesh we get this.
Now we just repeat the process over and over in various places we get something like this
That’s pretty much all there is to it, after you got your hair to look the way you want just attach all the hair parts into one mesh and you’re done. 
happy hair meshing!
Here is a little application i wrote mainly to recover lost meshes in case of a computer crash and your 3ds max files got wiped. It happened to me :/, luckily the IMVU previewer allows you to export your mesh resources, however they would either spit out a CMF(binary version of XMF) with the .xmf extension, or the XML version of the XMF file. Obviously this doesn’t help due to a lack as far as i know importer for 3ds max to get those meshes back in for editing or even at least recovering uv maps.