Hasta La Motion!

is there some way to have more control over the color of the hairs in maya fur? or anything really, I tried the puppet shader’s p_hair, 3dsMax hair and fur modifier, and shave and a haircutut and it’s all the same settings (root and tip are one solid colour, and mapping the base or tip just maps where on the object it’ll be, not the shaft itself).

For sake of simplicity, what I want is each hair should be a rainbow: red at base, yellow in middle, blue at tip.

any ideas? I’m open to learning any software package and/or any plugin, I’m just baffled I can’t find this as an option easily and readily so far.