The final stage in adding hair to your models is to render the scene. You can render hair using the Maya Software renderer or the mental ray for Maya renderer.
More about rendering hair in mental ray
To render in mental ray, select mental ray as your renderer. Also, ensure that the Render Fur/Hair attribute is turned on in the Extra Features section of the Features tab in the Render Settings window. Use the mayahair.mi shader to change render settings.
You can also use the new Production: Rapid Hair Quality Preset when rendering hair in mental ray (Render Settings window, Quality tab). Alternatively, you can use the new Production: Fine TraceQuality Preset as a starting point if you want to trace fur or hair in reflections.
For more information about rendering in mental ray, see mental ray for Maya renderer and Render Settings: mental ray tab of the Rendering guide.
Rendering hair in the Maya software renderer vs. mental ray for Maya
Refer to the following table for the differences between rendering hair in the Maya software renderer and mental ray for Maya.
The way that lighting and shading is calculated on Hair is slightly different between the native Maya renderer and mental ray and therefore the resulting renders will differ slightly in this respect; in both cases, an illumination model known as Kajiya/Kay is used, but the intensity at a given point is calculated in Hair’s own model for the native renderer, and in mental ray core for the mental ray renderer. This intensity is then used in the Kajiya/Kay illumination model to calculate diffuse/specular components.
