shell fur in HDRP - possible?

So I downloaded the Sherman Demo a while ago and was fascinated at how it took shell based fur so far that I barely noticed it. I was wondering if I could do the same myself. But modifying the HDRP was a HUGE mess for me, the lit shader alone (albeit being complex af) took up about 6 files NOT including the base render pipeline. Is it possible for me to create a special lit shader varient that supports fur shading? For clarification all I need is geometry so I can recursively duplicate the mesh say, 40 times and then apply an alpha cutoff for each layer to simulate fur as that's how it's generally done. Honestly, I just want to see something work by modifying the lit shader myself. Not asking how to make a fur shader, and I do have shader experience as I've programmed in c++ before to explicitly interact with openGL.

Cheers