I need to make this art piece in 3D but nothing looks good. I tried with hair and fur, hair to mesh, and applying displacement but it’s ugly…
If anyone has a brilliant idea that would be awesome.
I think I have an idea:
Maybe you can try instead of converting to mesh - convert to splines, and then scatter spheres with forest/railclone/corona scatter by splines?
Cant try it now, but you can check.
Splines and scattering was also my first thought, but using pflow could be interesting too. 
particle-rug-2016.max (864 KB)
How detailed does it have to be?
Wow did not know about corona scatter by spline ! Awesome !
It need to be as detailed as possible.