There are many parts to maya hair dynamics and this tutorial covers the initial styling of it. In this tutorial I create the hair from pulling splines off a nurbs surface and use the history on the surface to control the shape of the hair. I create my hair this way because I've found it to be the best way to style the hair and have the most control over it (constraints and simulations are so tedious for basic styling). If i have enough time at some point and enough people are interested, I'll cover rest curves and constraints and the true 'dynamics' of hair but, not in this tutorial. Once the style has been created, simulations can be run for whatever animation purposes.

Here we go

We need to define the area of the hair. A good way to do this is to draw curves
and loft them into a nurbs surface. Start off drawing a curve and placing it all
around the edge of where you want the hair to be.
 

Here I have all my basic curves in place. I'm not completely happy with the shape so i'll use clusters to control groups of CV's to help fine tune my shape.


Here are the curves after some adjustment.


Now select all the curves and loft. At this point you can delete the curves you made or stick them in a layer and forget about them. We're modeling with history here so any isoparms we pull off this surface will control any ammount of new curves we make as well as the final hair.



Now select isoparms from the nurbs surface. Make sure you space them out evenly from where the root of the hairline is so there's no gaps on the scalp.