Bad feather day! 3D feathers help....

Hi,
we are having problems at the moment trying to get feathers to work on our main character for a 2 minute short animation called "heidi"

We have tried Hair trix (Ornatrix & hairFX) but they are difficult to control, we want the feathers to have dynamics and to look great at the same time

If there are any other solutions in terms of plug ins for MAX & VRAY we would like to hear about them.

We are tearing our feathers our trying to solve this

Also if anyone knows of any other 3D animation forums worth posting on we would love to hear from you...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dAhFfBS_2CE

also her character studies and final version of what we want her to look like are here...

http://www.bigbadwolf.ie/illustration_ostrich.htm

thanks,
G