render a cottonball
 

anyone know some shaders or maya tools that i can use to render out a cottonball?

look into maya fur

deform a nurbs sphere a bit and then just cover it with fur plus of course some tweaking

i should also mention it will be animated fur is a little intense for me

ok so i experimented with fur i attached the photo below. any tweaks you know that will make the ball softer, i attached hair to a polygon sphere and im having these major divisions of fur among the edgeloops. Is there a way to fix that so the fur flows as a nice soft cushy ball?

im afraid fur is not going to do the trick, you should use alpha on half circled poly planes.
the shading should be fairly easy.