I prefer Blender internal render for fur, but Cycles is the renderer I'm comfortable with for the rest of the pipeline.
Blender internal seems to be faster for fur, and it creates a nice cartoony effect like in this llama tutorial from Blender open movie: https://youtu.be/vyX89sWljTQ
Is there some sort of node set that can convert particle render settings from Blender render to Cycles render? I can't seem to find a way in Cycles to get the same fast strand rendering that ignores raytracing on the fur.
Hey polygondust , you can still get pretty fast hair with Cycles if you're not going for realism (though it's good to note that all later short films with that llama were rendered in Cycles). Here are the settings you can try out for faster results at the cost of accuracy (which is essentially what BI was doing): 
@jlampel
Wonderful, thank you Jonathan! Your technical expertise is, as always, appreciated.
Will this method work for white fur? I noticed it's difficult to render white fur without using adder shaders, as it tends to turn out grey.
This is my method for white fur. The input on the left is just the image texture for color, and the output on the right goes to a typical material output node. Add shaders are taboo if you want to keep up realism, but I couldn't think of any other way to prevent my white fur from becoming grey. The color input is a very bright white, I think the transparency and reflectivity of the world is what deadens it unless I cheat and add some extra light.
This method tends to wash out the model in places where there is too much light, so it's not an ideal solution.
polygondust Before digging into this more, what lighting setup are you using, and are you using Filmic?
@jlampel Sorry for late response, got busy! I have a bunch of different ones, but I think my main one is three hemi lamps, one the most intense, like in the Piero tutorial. I was also testing with a spot lamp.
Not sure what Filmic is, should I look into that?
polygondust Filmic is a new option in Blender that will prevent lamps from washing out any bright spots in your scene, which makes almost every render better! Here's how it works:
It's now in Blender by default and just needs to be switched on (and it'll be on by default in 2.8), so no need to grab it from GitHub any more.
