Oh really? I thought xgen was a movie level only type of thing. Ideally, I'd like to stick with things I can use in Maya LT, as I only have a student license of the full Maya, but I'll check xgen out anyway just to see what can be done with that.
There's a deformer I used and wasnt satisfied with for what I was doing. I think it's called line deformer For hair cards though you should take a look at xgen - it's not great for super low poly work but for the sort of mid range stuff you see in tutorial videos it works very well