Thanks for the reply Jeordanis. I have 2 baking workflows. One for things like facial hair/beards and one for longer hair. I do plan to use the UE4 engine. 

For beards I would like to be able to take Ornatrix hair and bake it right into the face mesh itself. So the workflow would be to create a beard, convert it to a mesh, and create a color, normal, and possibly tangent normal map for it. I would be using the "Render to Texture" in 3DS Max for this and my renderer of choice is VRay. I am planning on using this workflow for background style characters where the intricate details won't matter as much. So I would like to bake in as much of the detail as I can.

The longer hair baking workflow:

1. Start by generating hair planes as is done here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XA8xDo5Cj8U

2. Generate hairs from those planes using Hair from Mesh Strips

3. Bake the hairs down to the planes as described in this EPhere tutorial here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1answy5ybCU 

I will need a color pass, normals, and tangent normals

On the rendering side I did a few more tests and included some images with settings. 

Render1 is the direct vray render with the material as shown with no changes from the "Light Brown" preset. No maps were used. 

Render2 I added in Mesh From Strands, disabled VRayOrnatrixMod, used billboards and per strand UV coords. As you can see here the render is quite different and a lot of the depth/specularity is missing.

Render3 I tried the same settings but with cylindrical meshes. The result is different than with billboards but still very flat. 

Render4 was just a test render. I altered the "Random gray hair density" in the material. It is supposed to be 30% but it turns 100% of the hair gray. In fact all the randomoization settings, glint, and softness don't work correctly.

My guess is that something inside the VRayOrnatrixMod feeds extra data to the renderer and when you try to render the hair as a mesh that data is lost and the results aren't as intended. I am not that concerned about the "randomization" settings inside the material. I can achieve similar results with gradient and noise maps. I am trying to get more consistency between rendering directly without converting to a mesh vs converting to one. 

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Attached Files:

Sadly I never really found a great solution. I was never able to get VRay / Orantrix to render with the same quality in mesh mode as it does in hair mode.

I managed to use a work around for the beard. What I did was take the portion of the original face model that I grew the hair from and flattened it out to make it perfectly planar just like it's UV shell. I then grew the beard from that flattened model instead of the original. The trick is to make sure the original model and the flattened variety have identical UVs. Once you have the flattened hair looking as you want you need to create an orthogonal camera with appropriate resolution aligned in such a way to render the baked maps you need. You can render directly without requiring bake to texture. This lets you use the full hair rendering model of VRay/Ornatrix without converting to mesh to get a beauty pass. You can then convert the hair to cylindrical mesh to get your normal, tangent normal, and opacity passes as needed (I just added them as render elements). This gives you quite decent results although it is a lot of going back and forth to get right since you can't work on the original model but have to work on a flattened version instead.

For longer hair this process doesn't work nearly as well... or is just much more complicated. Unlike a beard where most of the hair is just at surface level and there's not much layering required, longer hair needs a lot of layered hair planes to bake down to for good results. You can use the same kind of process of creating your hair on the original model, converting said hair to hair planes, and then creating a flattened version of the hair planes and grow your hair on them in order to get a good beauty pass to transfer back to the original hair planes. It's a lot more work and it's a lot more complicated to do this way. It also requires rather huge map resolutions.

I ended up just using the old fashioned approach of creating flat hair cards. Rendering needed hair maps on them. Then using those generated renders to texture ornatrix groomed hair planes on the model in question.