Uncle, as Vailias said, it is possible. The only issue is that you need to model the volume of the fur on the mesh directly on your model, so it's a few extra polygons you wasting here and there to make it look good, it depends if you want it, although Shells and Fins works under the same idea as SOTC shows it. Please note…
ace: I think you can do something similar with a lot fewer offsets with a control texture or two. The bump offset nodes can take a range of values. If you use a greyscale height map as the input to a lerp then set a min offset and a max offset, you can get up to 256 levels of offset out of one bumpoffset node. I did this…