You can make really good fur shells by using Blender's Dynamic Paint. Set up the hair with hair particles, convert it to a mesh, then use Dynamic Paint to "paint" the hair to each shell. It avoids the artificial uniform look of just changing the colour ramp on some texture for each shell (how it's usually done) because you…
what 3d packages are you using, in the case of 3ds max just keep the shell as a modifier, so the cloth sim is only happening to a plane, than it is being shelled after the cloth sim. that should also work in blender too since both shell and the soft body simulations are in the modifier stack. with some time i could prolly…