LAMH
is buggy and
does crash alot... unless you have learned (usually the hard way) how to avoid it. There are certain things that almost always cause the plug-in to crash. Once you know what they are, don't do them, and usually you're fine. As I write this, though, the plug-in did just crash, but saving the preset every few minutes really helps, both for the plug-in to behave, and to not lose your work... Fear not; fearless fuzzball has not been lost!
When I try to work on a LAMH preset, I always use a scene which is completely empty except for the single figure I'm playing with.
I set the figure resolution to "base" and the subdivisions to "0" - and save the scene - before opening the editor. I usually go through manually and delete all the geometry created by previous LAMH sims as well, since that really seems to bog down the plug-in.
Once the figure is loaded into the editor, the first "crash alert" to avoid is "un-checking" a surface in the pop-up menu for selecting surfaces to grow hair on. For some reason, this
always causes it to crash.
Once I have grown the guide hairs, I always save the preset right away. After that, after each major change, I add a numerically increasing name to the preset and save it again.
After that, the primary thing to avoid is moving the base figure while the editor window is open. That will also often crash the plug-in. I don't preview hair density either, since that is also pretty buggy. Other than that, saving incrementally ever few minutes works pretty well, and if the plug-in
does crash, you haven't lost very much. I have never had a problem with re-loading the presets once they are created, so the set-up is the only hard part, and, in my opinion, the end result is worth the hassle...
This particular preset has two layers: a dense, shorter undercoat (700000 hairs), and a
very thin (3000 hairs), longer overcoat to provide the wispy out-of-place hairs. I also had to decrease the diameter of the hairs drastically from the default, because the kitten is so small that the standard-sized hair looks like rope.
