I was unable to find the progress gif or screenshots I had made for this tutorial, which invovled the contruction of fur. What I do have however, are the fur samples I created.
I rememebred reading that animating fur is hard, very hard. Despite the progress made by some 20-or-more years of refinement in computer animation I have come to udnerstand why - mapping fur is fine, getting it to wave about? It looks like it would take a lot of meticulous and time-consuming planning. What did surprise me however was how quickly the fur was rendered. I had imagined that the procedure would take some time but perhaps the preocedural nature of how the fur is created was what allowed the strands to be drawn so quickly.
I was pleasantly surpised ot discover that for the most part, designing fur is about percentages. Some of the later strands in the above GIF were made by combining different types of animal hair and I fee ltempted to suggest that there's one that, if a bit of tweaking was involved (I think it was a combination of yak, sheep and bear hair) such as colour, the fur could resemble a tree canopy.
I suppose in animation, grass is as simple as a green fur shader with a lot of shorter strands and a few long strands. 50% Bear fur and 50% sheep's wool standing more on end and tinted green perhaps? Granted there are plenty of types and shapes of grass from the short half-inch tall strands of a golf course fairway to the sun-baked metre-long stalks of the African savannah.
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