Hair and fur effect has gone weird. It used to work fine, but now it renders incorrectly. It dosen’t work with lights, casting shadows (and i mean the basic shadow map and basic light types like omni and spot). It renders fine with general lights (the standard ones, when no other light exist), but once I setup my light it renders pure black (and without any shadows on geometry - although i set this up). I know that there’s no error on my side, I used to set this effect lots of times. (I double checked “use all lighits” and “Hair light attribs”.
So does anybody know how to restart this plugin? Or are there some settings session independent? I tried reinstalling SP2, but no luck. I don’t want to reinstall whole 3dsmax.

This may not be it but have you tried deleting the Hair/fur mod and then saving the file then merging everything into a new max file?

It’s not actually a matter of a scene rather a plugin, I get same bad results every time I start whole 3dsmax and create a scene from a start (it’s really rather for test sake). Everytime I turn on shadows (shadow map or raytraced shadows, nothing fancy) on a light, this light stops illuminating hair/fur (though the hair shadow generation process is launching).
This is of course with hair buffer on, but I need this method (or maybe somone knows a better one, but keep in mind my production renderer is NOT mental, and ‘geometry’ in my final scene just crashes renderer (more than 200k hair)). I tried this on couple of renderers - no luck.
Funny thing is that I get good illumination in reflections, and some hair shadows on MR, but the original hair are pith black.
Through scan line I get no hair shadows (though there’s appropriate process bar), and hair both in reflections and original are pitch black.
The same scene renders correctly on other machines! What could go wrong? Is there some patch for Hair/fur plugin? And why are there updates of this plugin for Maya and not for Max?

Haha ! Found it ! All my problems were solved once I changed system unit from mm to inches :) Strange though. Hope it helps someone