Protruding fur/grass/hair effect?

Hello everyone. Sorry to ask this again, but I really don’t like the idea of using a parallax effect to do fur, grass, or hair effects.

Parallax is, at least in every example I can find, a concave effect, so to make fur on an animal or anthro character, you’d have to inflate the faces where the effect would be and compensate using the depth value of the effect. I’d prefer, if possible, an effect that uses a pixel and/or a geometry shader to produce the intended effect. This would allow more freedom in modeling and overall design.

I have next to no knowledge of GLSL.

Any help here would be greatly appreciated.